


but then you took it all, love

by subwaywalls



Series: east of eden [3]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Magical Possession & Compulsion, Mild Blood, Wilbur Gets A Hug, dadza doing more dad things hooray, plot? in THIS series? it's more likely than you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27509338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subwaywalls/pseuds/subwaywalls
Summary: Wilbur remembers something, and dreams of more.(Philza suffers for it. Others will, too.)
Relationships: Dave | Technoblade & Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit & Phil Watson, Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson
Series: east of eden [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2006293
Comments: 406
Kudos: 1020





	1. falling

“Techno seems more active recently,” Philza notes, and Wilbur stops being able to focus on his book. “He’s going out a lot more, and he looks less stressed when he comes back.”

Wilbur isn’t particularly surprised that Philza picked up on that. Techno tends to be the most reserved one of their bunch, so his sudden interest and burst of activity is hard to miss.

Unfortunately, Wilbur doesn’t know how to explain that Techno has recently discovered a guy whose shapeshifting allows him to heal almost immediately, who also has the same taste for competitiveness and battle that Techno does, and the two of them have been beating each other silly in the forest every other day just for the fun of being able to let loose without risk of serious injury. 

Wilbur watched them once, for a minute or two. There was too much blood for him to stomach much more of it.

“He’s making friends,” Wilbur tries, and that doesn’t really taste like a lie. 

At this, Philza brightens. “Oh,” he says. “That’s good.”

“Yeah.” Even if it does mean that Techno spends less time in the home. His potatoes are still dutifully and diligently tended to, when Wilbur sticks his head out the back to take a peek, but overall he’s feeling a distinct _lessening_ of Techno’s low, quiet presence hanging out nearby. There’s just the quick ‘morning’ when they wake up and ‘see you’ before he heads out, and then _nothing_ for the whole day, and when he comes back he’s always beaten and bruised but bright-eyed, too.

Wilbur knows Techno probably comes out of the forest better than the other one does, but it’s still—it’s not—it’s something he’s getting used to.

“Wilbur,” Philza says.

“Yeah?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, long enough that Wilbur almost forgets that Philza wanted to say anything at all. But then, out of the blue, “Are you jealous?”

Wilbur sputters. “Wh-what? No! Of course not. Where is this coming from?”

Philza laughs at him, the cruel man, but he pats Wilbur’s shoulder in some form of apology. “It was just a thought,” he says. “If Techno’s been getting happier, you look like you’re starting to skew in the other direction, that’s all.”

“I am not,” Wilbur says, more petulantly than he meant to be. Clearing his throat, he tries again. “I’m fine.”

“Really, Wil?”

“Really,” he insists. “It’s good that Techno’s branching out and talking with more people! I—it just—it’s a little quiet now, sometimes.”

Philza raises a brow. “Techno’s the quietest one of you bunch,” he informs, which, yeah, he has a point there. The marginally lower level of noise in the house is not what’s really bothering Wilbur.

“It’s stupid,” Wilbur says instead.

“If it’s bothering you this much, then I don’t think it is,” Philza says.

“It is, though. I feel like… It was just the three of us for the longest time, right? Kind of. Tommy came and went a couple times, but we tried really hard not to get split up.” By that, Wilbur means he sang against their separation day in and day out, a slipshod melody so messy it’s a miracle that it worked. Nothing like the refined clarity they used for Tubbo so recently. 

Maybe the three of them would’ve found stable homes faster if they allowed themselves to be split up, but they’d found camaraderie in their secret powers and didn’t want to be alone in that when their gifts were still new and unfamiliar. They were too selfish to let each other go.

It worked out in the end, thankfully. Wilbur will never forget the relief he felt when Philza said yes to all three of them at once.

But now—now, they’re safe enough to reach out a little more, independent of each other, and Wilbur doesn’t know how he feels about that. He doesn’t want to say that he’s afraid of Techno’s outgrowing them and finding a little spot for himself where his brothers can’t understand or follow, because that’s a silly thing to think and an even sillier thing to be afraid of. Wilbur doesn’t consider himself _that_ attached to his brothers. Why would he get anxious over them getting invested in something without him? If anything, he’d expect Tommy to take that role. Tommy’s usually the clingy one.

And yet. Tommy isn’t the one having trouble, is he?

None of this makes it past Wilbur’s lips. He purses them shut, but Philza seems to read it off the downturn of his mouth anyway. He wraps an arm around Wilbur in an understanding side hug (it feels like a full hug, though, with gentle warmth pressing in from angles where there should be nothing but air) and holds him quietly for a bit.

“They’re not going to leave you behind, Wil,” Philza eventually says, gently. “You worked very hard to keep them safe before, and just because they don’t need that level of devotion anymore doesn’t mean they love or think of you any less.”

Wilbur sucks in a shaky breath, blinking furiously in hopes of making the stinging in his eyes go away. “I know,” he says.

“If you miss him that much, tell him.”

“I know.”

“He won’t be mad at you. He’s _Techno_.”

Wilbur chokes out a laugh, because—yes, Techno is terrifying in the rare times when he’s angry, and equally as scary when he’s absolutely chipper, but he doesn’t turn that on his family. For all the violence he lives for, not a drop of it touches those he loves. He wouldn’t get mad at Wilbur for something like this. He’d understand.

“It feels dumb,” Wilbur says anyway.

“It’ll feel dumber the longer it takes for you to tell him, mate,” Philza says. “Come on, you’ll be fine.”

Wilbur groans theatrically, but the more he thinks about it, the more reasonable Philza’s suggestion sounds. He leans back on the couch, throwing an arm over his eyes, but he can’t stop the small smile from taking root on his face. “Thanks, dad,” he says to the darkness of his sleeve.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Philza says. Wilbur feels him shift, like he’s taking a breath to say something else, but nothing else comes.

Curious, Wilbur lifts his arm from his face. He regrets putting pressure on his eyes, because now his vision is specked with snowdrop spots and patches of darkness that flicker, oddly reminiscent of a night sky. But past that visual noise, he can see Philza’s face turned away, towards… the front door, maybe? 

As though on cue, the doorbell rings.

Like a signal, the air shifts. Wilbur feels some of that warmth pull away, and Philza sits up straighter, a slight frown marring his usual expression. 

“Dad?” Wilbur says, and Philza stands up with the fluid grace of someone who knows exactly what type of unpleasant experience he’s about to walk into. 

“Stay here,” he says distractedly. His eyes are narrowing, like he can see the person at their door from here. “I’ll get it. It’s probably nothing,” he adds, but that doesn’t come across quite as reassuring as he’d probably like it to.

“Okay,” Wilbur says, watching Philza stride out of the room and towards the front door. He looks back down at his half-forgotten book, trying to find his place again, but all he can think of is how he can hear the footsteps making their way down the hall to the door.

The sound of the door unlocking feels loud enough to shake the house. It creaks protestingly as it swings open, and two voices begin to murmur to each other. Wilbur recognizes one as Philza immediately, of course, but the second…

He can’t place where he’s heard it before, but it’s _familiar_ somehow. He’s convinced he knows it from somewhere. Where? Wilbur can’t remember. 

There’s too much distance between Wilbur and the door for him to pick up on anything for now. He probably shouldn’t listen in anyway, if he’s being fair. Curiosity killed the cat, and all.

But something about that other voice nags at him. He tries to look back at his book, tries to keep his attention to himself, but the words melt away into every question he has about this visitor. He wonders who and why and what, and his mind keeps pivoting in circles until finally he can’t stand it anymore and drops the book in his lap. 

There are a few short songs he’s committed to memory for the sake of utility, and one of them goes _I always hear what they say / no matter how far away_. It’s easy to hum the notes under his breath and quietly sing the stanza, straining to make sense of the conversation at the door, and… 

The dull murmuring sharpens into words. Wilbur grins.

“—just to say hello?” says the voice that Wilbur can’t place.

“No,” says Philza.

“Hey, now. That’s not how hospitality works! I say ‘may I come in’ very politely and you say—”

“You may not,” Philza repeats, deadpan. “Nope. You’re not allowed. Good _bye_.”

“Oh, a goodbye instead of a farewell? Kind of ironic nowadays, wouldn’t you say.”

“I don’t care. Leave.”

The other voice continues to wheedle and plead, and with every growing second Wilbur feels like he should _definitely_ recognize that voice from somewhere. Somewhere important, he thinks. It’s slick and sly and accented not unlike Techno, but that comparison feels disingenuous. There’s something else. Why can’t he remember?

_(You did that? I’m impressed—_ from someone in a black suit. _)_

Wait.

_(With nothing but a song, huh?_ —a smile like a snake’s, a forked tongue and sideways slitted pupils— _I’d say you’re the closest thing this plane has to a demiurge.)_

When did that happen?

_(Your gift is something else_ —twisted horns, pointed tips— _I bet this is small potatoes compared to what you could really do_ —something like wings but too white and pale and smooth— _why not test it? Give it a shot_ —bone shards in a mockery of feathers, bleached in too much sun, rattling with every little movement like a warning— _I said,_ **_give it a try_ ** _, you little—)_

“Wilbur?”

He sucks in a strangled breath, feeling like he’d just run a marathon. Those were memories, right? They felt like memories, or maybe a particularly vivid dream. 

No, that’s it, it has to be a dream. Those features—the white wings of bone, the curling horns—don’t make sense otherwise. He’d know if he met someone like _that_.

Right?

“Wil,” Philza says, maybe for the second or thirty-second time today, and Wilbur jolts out of his thoughts. A touch to his shoulder dispels the creeping apprehension in his gut, and he turns to look at the concerned face of his dad. “Are you good, mate?”

Wilbur swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “Who was at the door?”

Philza’s worried expression flattens into a faint grimace. “Let’s… call him an old coworker that was fired a long time ago. He’s not supposed to be here.”

Oh. Wilbur figures he’s probably run into the guy once before, then, and just didn’t enjoy the vibes and had a nightmare about him or something. 

“You look a little pale,” Philza continues. “Do you know him?”

“I don’t know,” Wilbur says honestly. He wants to ask the guy’s name, but the question gets stuck in the roof of his mouth, and the more he tries to force the words out the less they move. Panic closes his throat for a split instant but melts in the same moment; he can breathe, he just can’t—fold his tongue around the request for the stranger’s name.

Some part of him thinks maybe it’s because he already knows it. The rest of him thinks that makes an incredible lack of sense.

Philza apparently doesn’t notice his internal turmoil. “Well, don’t worry about him, he can’t come in. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to careful with stranger danger. Oh—we got a little distracted, but don’t forget to talk with Techno. Maybe invite his friend over sometime, that might help.”

Wilbur imagines bringing in the bickering shapeshifter, who rarely goes anywhere without his hydromancer and pyromancer friends, and the face he makes must be an incredible sight, because Philza immediately bursts out laughing.

“I’m sure they’re nice people,” Philza says.

“They’re nice,” Wilbur agrees, “just, you know. Chaotic.”

“Wil,” Philza says with the great, longsuffering love of a tired but happy parent, “ _nobody_ is more chaotic than you or Tommy.”

* * *

Wings made of bone fragments seem incredibly inconvenient, Wilbur thinks, running his fingers along them. They’re shaped more like shark teeth or guitar picks than actual feathers. Stunted. It would still be cool if they could fly, though.

“You could probably sing yourself a pair.”

He could make himself a set if he wanted to, yes. But why would he? Wings aren’t supposed to be like this. He doesn’t _like_ them like this, all rattlesnake-tail and shaking with the effort of keeping them together.

He pushes the shattered wings away, and they tear open the tips of his fingers where they touch him. It hurts, like paper cuts. Now he likes them even less.

“Well, I’m offended. You don’t even know there’s any other option.”

Maybe not, but he likes to imagine there is. A darker expanse, as wide and deep as the ocean. No, not the ocean. Deep like the night sky, like space, like a galaxy that drapes over him when he sleeps, a curtain of star-speckled void that hums in a comforting voice. 

The imagined wings tie themselves to the memories of Philza calming them down from nightmares and panic attacks, though he doesn’t know why.

“I do. Man, I can’t believe this. He’s really spoiled you guys.”

His fingers are still bleeding. The cuts weren’t that deep, and they should be slowing down by now, but they’re not. 

They need to stop soon. He’s not like Techno, who bleeds freely and recklessly. Wilbur has a very limited supply of blood, and he’d like it to remain in his body instead of outside of it.

“Oh, right. Oops! My bad. Let me help you with that, huh?”

The blood _tugs_ at him. Wilbur gasps, and a low agony sparks at his fingertips as the red lifts from where it was dripping down his hand. It curls through the air, like a red string still tied to his veins, and drifts determinedly towards the stranger with the wings.

His suit is unnaturally clean, but every other part of him looks singed and shriveled, soot-blackened—aside for those _eyes,_ gold and sideways slitted. 

The blood comes to a rest in the stranger’s palm like a docile snake, spanning the distance between them in more and more red, and—splatters, when he closes his fist on it.

Suddenly, Wilbur can’t feel his arm. The numbness climbs up his shoulder to his chest, and he can’t feel himself breathe. The panic sets in late, sluggish, and even that goes numb after a beat, once it climbs his neck to his skull. His legs lose feeling too, and he crumples to the ground.

It strikes him that he can’t feel the floor, either. Is there a floor at all?

No, there isn’t. He’s falling.

“Well, that was easy,” the voice says, and Wilbur falls, and falls, and falls. "Pleasure doing business with you, idiot."

(Elsewhere, a starry feather snaps in half, and the bones devour it. Someone rolls awake in the night, coughing up shards and dust, the fracturing of an oath lodged somewhere in those shivering feathers.)

* * *

There are white lines crisscrossing the tips of Wilbur’s fingers, like scars. When he wakes up from that nightmarish dream, he smiles at them.

“So much for never getting into this stupid place,” he says, and laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> does it make it better if i promise a happy ending


	2. adjusting

Philza slowly removes his hand from his mouth. Splinters of bone sit on his palm, glistening with blood.

He’s lost a feather. (He doesn’t know where it is anymore. He only knows how it is, like a splinter wiggling in his mind: a snapped quill, the vane all but ripped out, an eye torn apart by the broken bones he’s just spit out—and every now and then, the unholy will touch it with his son’s flesh and blood, and Philza will double over in another retch, every eye weeping.)

His oath cracks apart, spiderwebbing hairline fractures across the endless expanse of his twitching wings, and—

_Not yet,_ he mouths to the unlistening fabric of creation, to the quiet of his own room. _Not yet. I can fix this._

* * *

Techno doesn’t know why or how, but the house feels… unsteady this morning.

It shouldn’t, is the thing. 

This has been his secure home for years. There’s no reason for that old need to keep his valuables on hand and his brothers within eyeshot to start bucking in the back of his mind again. He’s not going to get uprooted. _They’re_ not going to get uprooted—him, Wilbur, Tommy, and at this rate he might as well add Tubbo to those ranks too—because Philza would never abandon them. 

Nobody’s going anywhere. 

But Techno’s gut churns like he’s just been told to pack up all over again, and he hates it, this anxiety that claws up his throat for no reason. 

Flaring up without reason is how paranoia works, but Techno had been doing so well for so long that this crawling panic feels like a disheartening slap in the face of all his carefully built trust. It makes him feel young again, but not in a good way. Just helpless. 

Techno realizes he’s spiraling at the brink of an anxiety attack and shuts his eyes. “Stop it,” he says, trying to shake off those negative lines of thought. The sound of his own voice, realer than the fears in his head, help ground him. “Just breathe. I’m fine. See? Not even close. I’m good.”

As his thoughts slow down, letting go of that anxious fervor, he opens his eyes again. He’s in his room. His old tee is soft and a pale pink against his skin. He can hear the heater humming in the walls. He smells blood. 

Oh, that’s not ideal. Looking down, he sees tiny red crescents in his palm where he’d unwittingly clawed himself. It’s a minor injury, and the bleeding seals itself up by the time he makes his way to the sink, but it’s not exactly an optimistic start to the day.

Washing off the remaining blood, he quickly checks himself to make sure his clothes aren’t splattered with gore before leaving the washroom. He figures that seeing his family intact will appease that unreasonable paranoia that’s bothering him, so he makes sure to drop by his brothers’ rooms.

Tommy’s still sprawled out on his bed, snoring the weekend morning away. Techno mentally checkmarks that particular box and moves on to Wilbur’s room, though—as expected—it’s empty. There’s enough murmuring downstairs that Techno assumes Wilbur is having breakfast with Philza, so he heads on down to join them.

As he approaches, it becomes clear that Wilbur’s dominating the conversation. That’s not particularly odd, when he’s got a topic he’s excited about. The odd part is the… lilting rhythm of his speech. The cadence is different somehow.

It’s also not coming from the kitchen or the dining table. Techno stares at the plates left barely-eaten there and tries to ignore the anxiety slowly building itself back up in his chest. Just because they’re talking at the door doesn’t mean anything. Wilbur’s probably just saying bye before he heads out to an unusually early day.

“… so ruffled, old man. Don’t you worry, I’ll take good care of it,” says Wilbur’s voice, and Techno tells himself that there’s nothing to get worked up about. It’s just Wilbur. He doesn’t sound particularly angry, and in fact seems quite the opposite. They’re clearly fine.

“Don’t,” Philza’s voice comes, uncharacteristically stormy. Wilbur laughs at him, and after a moment, he hears the door swing shut.

Techno holds still for a beat or so more, so he can have plausible deniability of not having walked into the tail end of that conversation, and then practically stomps into the entryway to announce his presence.

“Mornin', Phil,” he says, finally turning the corner to see him.

“Hey, Techno.” Philza smiles, but he looks tired. He’s leaning on his cane at such an angle that the lamplight bends around the crown of his head, casting a shadow that stretches from wall to wall. It makes him look smaller, somehow. “There’s breakfast on the table. I, uh, I’ll be a little busy today.”

“Alright,” Techno says, puzzled. “Tommy’s still asleep, so he shouldn’t be up botherin' anyone until noon or somethin'. Where’d Wilbur go?”

This stirs Philza somewhat. He laughs and straightens with the slightest tinge of tension in his voice, shaking off that ominous shadow. “He didn’t tell me,” he says, and claps a reassuring hand on Techno’s shoulder as he walks past. “I don’t suppose you know what he’s done?”

Techno doesn’t respond, because—he smells blood again. There’s iron in the air, very faint but damning all the same. Instinctively, he glances down at himself, trying to see if he’d accidentally opened something, but it’s not him. He’s clean.

It fades when Philza moves away. 

The implication doesn’t sink in until after Philza walks away, at which point the room feels as though the temperature dropped several degrees. If there’s blood on him, he must be hurting somewhere. 

He probably hasn’t said anything because he doesn’t want to worry them. The only reason Techno caught on is because he’s a little sensitive to it after spending so much of his life bleeding profusely and then scrubbing it off after. 

Techno looks up to the bedrooms, trying to think. No, Tommy is _not_ the person to talk about this, but—maybe Wilbur. Wilbur does better with these kinds of things, even if he did sound a little off this morning. 

Unfortunately, when Techno rings him, he doesn’t pick up. His texts go unread, too, and that leaves Techno staring at his phone alone in the dining room, paralyzed with indecision as he waits for a response that he’s starting to think isn’t going to happen.

Wilbur doesn’t ignore his texts and calls. He usually lets them know if he’s planning something that requires a silenced phone, but maybe he forgot this time. Maybe it’s just sitting unnoticed under a guitar case or something.

Either way, Techno can’t just stand here all day. His nerves worsen the longer this takes, and he still can’t shake the feeling that his home is more fragile than it was yesterday. Add on the fact that Philza might be hurting in secret, and… 

He needs to move. He needs to do _something_ that isn’t just—this. 

Muscle memory opens up a different chat.

He gets a response in seconds.

* * *

Techno swings his arm up just in time stop the wolf from ripping his face off, though the fangs sink deep into his forearm instead. He can feel the canine trying to force him down and rolls with it, allowing himself to get bowled over, and since his opponent wasn’t expecting that, the excessive force sends them rolling uncontrollably across the clearing.

The wolf’s on top when they smack into a tree, but the force of the impact is enough to loosen the bite enough that Techno can pull his arm free. He doesn’t give the wolf a chance to try again, bringing his knees up with his feet ready to kick himself free. But just as he’s about to do that, the wolf melts, and a hissing snake lands on him with the hood already flaring open.

“Nice try,” Techno says, and grabs the snake behind the head, safe from the fangs spitting venom just inches from his face. The rest of the body twists in the air, trying to get free, but Techno keeps a firm grip and squeezes, trying to force a yield. 

Suddenly, he has a fistful of dirty blond hair instead, and a very human knee is jabbing into his diaphragm, making it hard to breathe. Dream mocks, “Nice try yourself,” before he bears down—literally, as in a _literal bear,_ because he can do that—and Techno flips out his pocket knife and slashes it across the dark brown fur.

Blood splatters on the ground and Dream bellows in pain, swatting his knife hand to the side. Techno sits up only for Dream to chomp down on his shoulder and move back, dragging Techno with him. Switching his knife to his other hand, Techno grits his teeth so hard he’s surprised none of them crack and stabs blindly, digging the blade in for as much damage as he can do.

There’s a grunt, and then the bear form melts, reconstructing in a blink to a panting Dream. A forcibly broken form means he can’t shift immediately afterward, so Techno lunges with victory within sight, his blood roaring in his ears—

Dream pivots, neatly dodging the initial rush, and slams his elbow into the back of Techno’s neck as he passes. “You _thought_!” he crows, breathless, and his body stutters in the way Techno recognizes as Dream healing himself.

Techno bares his teeth at him and sweeps Dream’s legs from under him with his own. What hits the ground is a whole-ass crocodile, though, and it charges immediately with full intent to at least break a limb.

Unluckily for him, Techno knows that it’s much harder to open that mouth than to bite down with crushing force. He throws himself forward, clean over that toothy maw, and tucks his head to roll with the landing onto the crocodile’s back. 

Dream snarls and whips around, making a futile effort to dislodge him. His claws gouge into Techno’s legs, but those wounds are superficial compared to what Techno can do against the rough hide of his back.

He gets only one slash in before Dream catches on, though, and he shifts back human just in time so that his shrinking mass causes Techno to miss entirely, because a crocodile’s center of mass is a little hard to judge.

Dream flips around, a gleam in his eyes, and this time pounces as a lion. He gets his claws in Techno’s already torn-up arms and snaps down, fangs driving for his throat.

They break skin—and stop.

Techno grins, blood in his teeth and a knife in the lion’s chest. 

Dream could crush his windpipe to nothing. Techno could rip open his lung. They’ve caught each other at a stalemate here, where a move in any direction could kill them both. 

They could go further. They normally do; there’s not much yielding in this play-fight of theirs, only blacking out from blood loss or pain and waking up to the other’s smug victory.

But Dream’s paused, and Techno stays his hand until the other resumes and takes a move. It’s rude to keep going when the other’s pulled back, and as much as their skirmishes are to vent without fear of collateral or permanent damage, that’s no excuse to practice bad partnership.

Slowly, Dream withdraws. The lion form moves a pace away, stopping only to lap at his stab wound with a vaguely offended air.

Techno sits up. He shakes his head, clearing some of the battle-haze bloodlust, and messily wipes his knife on his already ruined clothes. Good-naturedly, he says, “Stop lookin' at me like that stab’s the worst thing you’ve ever felt. You could just shift.”

Dream lifts his chin and growls, as though to say, _I could, but I won’t._ And then he seems to get tired of the bleeding and shifts back to human form anyway.

“Are we counting this one as a tie?” Dream asks. His form stutters again, shifting but not actually changing anything except for the state of his wounds, which vanish. He goes over to his bag of spare clothes and starts swapping out the torn remnants of his current wear with something socially acceptable.

“Who’s keepin/ track?” Techno returns, and Dream snickers. They’ve tried to tally it up before, but a lot of fights seem to slide into each other, and sometimes they pass out _almost_ simultaneously, so it’s hard to draw a definitive line. Techno figures he averages three wins for every five bouts, though every now and then Dream will pull out something tricky that takes him a few rounds to understand and counter.

Normally, it’s a new technique pulled from somewhere in his own circle of friends, but on occasion it’ll be just a whole new animal form. No partial transformations, though—Techno doubts he’s capable of those. 

Dream’s a little cagey with his limits, but honestly, so long as he’s not in danger of accidentally dying and putting Techno up for manslaughter, Techno doesn’t mind the secrecy.

Techno finds a small outcropping of rock to perch on, making a face at his numerous oozing injuries. Now that the rush of the battle is over, there’s nothing to distract him from his various pains. The most boring part of this setup by far is how long it takes to heal before he can change out of his soiled clothes and go anywhere that anyone could see him at.

People tend not to react well to a guy soaked in blood, so.

“The elbow was a new one,” Techno remarks.

“Yeah, I picked that one up from Sapnap. Except he did it to my throat, and I couldn’t breathe right for like two seconds. It was fun, though.” Dream plops down with no regard for the cleanliness of his changed clothes, sighing comfortably in a patch of sunlight. He stretches out in a distinctly feline way, spine arching to a painful-looking angle, before he relaxes in the dirt. He slow-blinks at Techno. “Not that you didn’t do as insane as you normally do, but what’s got you so distracted?”

“What?”

“Dude, you let me shift _twice_ before you got out of that pin. There’s no way that would happen on a normal day. What’s up?”

Techno snorts. “And you still couldn’t beat me durin' that. Should I be askin' what’s botherin' _you_?”

“You’re so annoying,” Dream grumbles, moving his foot to lightly kick at him.

The quiet stretches on for a beat or two more, and then Techno sighs.

“Something’s up at home,” he admits. “I don’t know what it is, but it feels weird.”

Dream rolls onto his stomach, a level of genuine concern starting to creep into his gaze. Just because he hasn’t had the same experience as Techno doesn’t mean he doesn’t get it. “Bad weird, or good weird?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But for sure weird, though.”

“Yup.”

Dream says, “Well, if you need it, we’ve got a spare room at our place.” And then, when Techno stays quiet, “Bad’s off visiting his friend, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Is it that obvious,” Techno says, more of a dry statement than a question.

“I’ve told you, he’s nicer than he looks!”

“He makes muffins sound like a _threat_ , Dream.”

“They’re just replacements for swear words, it’s nothing serious.”

“Muffins are serious business.”

“Not when Bad’s—actually, yeah, they’re sometimes serious business with Bad. But not when he’s just throwing the word around because he wants to avoid swearing.”

Techno shakes his head. He’s met Bad a grand total of two times, and it was fairly amicable in both cases except for the fact that Techno constantly felt like he was being watched. Bad had his head turned away several times, so even though his shades concealed where he was looking at, there’s no way he could be staring at Techno all the time.

Still, the feeling hung around until Bad left, so Techno’s not the most comfortable with him. 

He knows the guy’s perfectly friendly, and with no other friend to turn to Techno will gladly take refuge under his roof, but he just… prefers to gently steer clear in the meantime.

Dream hums thoughtfully. “I don’t think it’ll get that bad, though. But I could check in. You know what they say about bird’s eye views?”

“Uh, no?”

“Me neither. But it’s supposed to help, being from a different angle and all. I might notice something from above that wouldn’t be obvious from the ground.”

Techno doubts that’s necessary, or particularly promising, but the lack of an active distraction means he’s just _worried_ about his family again. “If your friends won’t tear you a new one for ditchin' them, sure.”

“That was _one_ time.”

“I’m pretty sure they attempted to boil you alive. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen them work together.”

“One time! And they gave themselves steam burns while I got off scot-free.”

“If you call gettin' completely soaked ‘scot-free’, then sure.”

Dream hurls himself at him in playful aggravation, and Techno lets go of his worries in favor of flipping him into the ground. 

* * *

Hands clasped behind his back, the figure of Wilbur Soot smiles into the sunshine. It’s a tight fit, with nothing but a bare layer of muscle and sinew between the once-holy and the definitely-not, but he enjoys the low burn of the opposite energies attempting and failing to destroy each other. It’s nostalgic, in a way. Painful, but familiar.

He doesn’t remember when or how long it took for his wings to blacken and rot away under the disdainful glare of creation, but it had been unpleasant until he’d… settled.

It stopped aching eons ago, like the scar where _his_ name used to sit, but it’s hard to forget that kind of transformation. This pain is similar enough that he can keep it in the back of his mind, unobtrusive.

He doubts the other end of this interaction of power is nearly as well-adjusted to it as he is, though. Such a shame, the inflexibility of the celestial. They have a rough time dealing with new things. It’s why those that remember enough to know what their oath used to be just bind themselves to a new one again.

Wilbur—and he likes that name, Wilbur; might as well take that with him too—knows better. All of the survivors of the below know better.

It’s more enjoyable to walk out of line, funnier to drag others with them.

And now he has the protection of an oath to toy with, too. What a rare and precious thing to fall right into his hands. He dearly wants to see how far he can stretch that thing, how much it’ll endure before it snaps, how long the soul on the other end will bleed until it either dies or heals or—best of all— _changes,_ like the rest of them.

Wilbur walks through the open park with a spring in his step and a vicious light in his eyes. 

(Wilbur drifts, lost.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys have been so kind with kudos and comments ;; ty <3


	3. knowing

Despite his bad relationship with his old colony, or maybe because of it, Tubbo likes watching bees.

He just thinks they’re neat. They don’t hivemind, but they still communicate very efficiently for such tiny things without audible language. 

The local park is a good place to find them. Its flowerbeds tend to be a little too trampled to be considered healthy, but they’re enough to attract the occasional buzzing worker. Tubbo walks along the dainty cobble pathways, keeping an eye out for any little black-yellow visitors, and nearly walks right smack into someone because he’s too busy staring at the flowers.

“Sorry!” he says, stepping aside at the last moment. He hopes he hadn’t accidentally clipped them through the glamour, and turns for a more extended apology, only to realize exactly who he’d nearly collided with. “Wilbur?”

Wilbur doesn’t usually frequent this area, so it’s a delightful surprise to see him here. “Oh hey, Tubbo,” he says, grinning. “I guess like calls to like after all.”

Tubbo opens his mouth, pauses to see if those words will make sense if he lets them marinate for a second, and… nope, still gibberish. “Like what?”

“Like abyss and below. We’re practically cousins, if you think about it.” Before Tubbo can even begin to work out the problems with that remark (not least of which being that they’re on the verge of becoming literal brothers, so how do cousins come into play?), Wilbur suddenly straightens with a devious look in his eyes. “Speaking of, I figured out something cool with these powers, wanna hear?”

Interest piqued and attention immediately diverted from that odd remark, Tubbo nods eagerly. Wilbur always complains about his power, bemoaning how much attention to detail he has to keep in mind to make sure everything works the way he wants it to, so it’s rare for him to actually sound excited about it. This must be a pretty big discovery.

Wilbur leans in, like this is a particularly delicate secret, and whispers, “It turns out, I don’t actually need to  _ sing _ anything to make shit happen.”

Tubbo’s thoughts come to a screeching halt. “Wait, what?” he says. “That’s—but I thought singing was the whole point of your power.”

“The singing was just the most basic way to get heard,” Wilbur says dismissively. He waves a hand, broadly gesturing to the world around them. “Dude, creation  _ loves _ this guy, it’s insane. Have you ever seen the fabric of reality bend over backwards to try and understand what a single person wants even though it’s never had the need or ability to comprehend language before, and then remakes itself just to make those things true? That’s what it does for me now. It—it’s like a needy pet. It just needed a way to understand me that’s not as haphazard as singing.”

That’s very,  _ very _ different from how Wilbur’s described his power in the past. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t really get any of that,” Tubbo says. “You can do more than create things, right?”

“Tubbo, I can fucking undo and remake whole  _ events, _ of course I can do more than make things.”

So why all this talk of creation, then? Tubbo squints helplessly at him, trying to piece together words that aren’t making any sense. He tries not to let the sharpness of Wilbur’s tone get to him. He’s just excited, he didn’t mean to sound like that.

“Here,” Wilbur says, exasperated. “Watch this.” 

He clears his throat and straightens, and there’s something weird in the way he holds himself—like he’s hesitant to straighten out all the way, in case something pulls or hurts. Tubbo’s enthusiasm wavers, beginning to curdle into caution.

“Just to make sure we won’t be interrupted: nobody else in this place is going to notice us do anything out of the ordinary,” Wilbur says. 

Nothing changes, because nobody was paying attention to them in the first place, but the fact that Wilbur thought it would be necessary to ensure is faintly troubling. “Um,” Tubbo says.

Wilbur nods, self-satisfied. And then, “Techno, come over for a bit.” It’s such a casual remark that Tubbo instinctively looks around, searching for the familiar figure even though he knows Techno isn’t here.

(Halfway across town, space folds, yanking a confused man through existence until—)

“What,” says Techno, standing in grass he hadn’t been at a second before, “was that.”

“Oh you really  _ don’t _ need to sing!” Tubbo says, forgetting his trepidation for excitement. 

Wilbur frowns. “I—really? That’s what you got from that, and not the fact that I can instantly speak anything into happening?”

“Well, it’s obviously also so much faster and more precise this way,” Tubbo says. “It’s just really different from how we thought your thing worked. Not needing to sing opens up so many possibilities.”

“Why am I here,” says Techno, who understandably looks completely lost. “Wait—hold on, you don’t need to sing? Since when was that a thing?” 

“Oh, just recently. And it gets better, too,” Wilbur says. His grin twists into something crueler, and for a split moment Tubbo thinks he and Techno share the same look of uncertain fear. “Tubbo, you feel perfectly safe. Techno? Kill him.”

Tubbo frowns. Of course he’s safe, it’s not like Techno would actually—

Techno says, “Why?” but the sound dies halfway out of his mouth. His expression falls strangely flat, and he turns to look at Tubbo intently.

“That’s not very funny, Wilbur,” Tubbo says, and distantly he remembers that nobody’s going to notice anything out of the ordinary. That’s good; as awful of a joke as this is, the sight of Techno lunging at him with a knife in his hands would probably scare bystanders into doing something rash, and they really don’t need that kind of mess. He’s perfectly safe, after all.

Sure, Tubbo doesn’t enjoy being knocked overo harshly that his back hurts, and Techno’s being a bit rough with playing along, and that  _ is _ a very sharp glint on the edge of that blade being raised over him, but he’s safe.

He catches his breath and releases it in a short giggle, because there’s nothing to be afraid of. Wilbur and Techno are here and Tommy will probably join them soon, he hates being left out of group things like this. Philza should be here, too, it would be nice if Philza were here—he really wants Philza here, wants to have the whole family together and not just Techno raising a knife and Wilbur watching—he’s safe but he’s starting to think he wants more—

(In his shadow, a feather shivers, and blue eyes turn his way.)

In the sky, two wings furl in, and a small shape plummets.

* * *

A peregrine falcon can reach a speed of over 320 kilometers an hour at the steepest point of its stoop, in ideal conditions. That’s nearly 89 meters a second.

Nobody’s ever timed the downswing of an undying man with a knife, but it’s not faster than that. It’s not even fast enough to hit its target before the falcon dives a hundred humble meters, if only because he wasted time knocking his target to the ground first.

That means the bird has time to come in  _ screeching _ between the knife and its target. The blade sinks hilt-deep into that speckled underbelly, but it doesn’t stop the bird from lashing out with talons and wings so furiously that those delicate bones nearly shatter against Techno’s skull.

No matter how superficial the wounds a mere bird of prey can inflict on him, Techno recoils from the flurry of motion with a grimace. Between the impact and the knife, the damage is too much to sustain the falcon for, and Dream shifts back to human form with blood on his lips and a knife falling to his feet, windblown hair still falling back into place.

“What the fuck are you doing, Techno?” he snaps, bristling. All he’d seen was that purposeful, deadly strike in the making and Tubbo’s utter lack of guard—both crystal clear in a falcon’s eyes, though the conversation leading up to it was too far to hear. He’d been hovering after Wilbur just a short while before, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to make sure Techno’s brothers were alright, and he’s damn glad he did. “You too, Tubbo—why are you just sitting there?”

Tubbo looks at him like he’s asking a stupid question. “It’s Techno,” he says, which is true. “He wouldn’t hurt me,” which would also normally be true, but Dream’s fought Techno enough to know that he was  _ serious _ this time.

“Oh, it’s  _ still _ going,” says Wilbur with utter delight, and Dream turns his head a few degrees to glare over his shoulder. Wilbur remains unaffected, continuing, “What about you, Techno, you still up to fatally stab him?”

Techno has gone still. So has Tubbo, who’s looking at himself like he’s struggling to process why he’s on the ground right now. After a moment, Tubbo’s breath hitches at the exact same time that Techno’s does, and Tubbo’s hand snatches out to latch around Dream’s wrist, eyes wide. His body flickers like a hologram with bad reception, hinting at something shiny and segmented, very much not skin and muscle and—Dream decides to process that later. Tubbo’s powers are his own business. 

Someone who uses theirs on others with intent to harm is definitely Dream’s business, though. “What did you do,” Dream demands of Wilbur, who flashes him a grin with too many teeth. 

“We were just testing out this new thing I learned,” Wilbur says, “like this: take a seat, Dream.”

Dream doesn’t have the time to ask  _ where _ sarcastically before he realizes he’s already sitting, legs folded neatly in a criss-crossed position. He scrambles to get back to his feet, ignoring Wilbur’s amused snigger, and hauls Tubbo up with him. 

“S’not Wilbur,” Tubbo whispers from halfway behind Dream. He’s shaking—he’s buzzing, actually, and Dream gets the feeling that he knows less about Tubbo’s situation than he thought. More importantly, he insists, “It’s not him, I saw the—I saw the  _ wings, _ Wilbur doesn’t have wings. You’re not Wilbur,” and now he’s working himself up into a proper frenzy, shouting at the person who apparently isn’t Wilbur, “you’re  _ not! _ Stop pretending! Where is he?”

“I’m not pretending anything,” the imposter says. “He’s still right here, body and all. I’m just borrowing his… everything, for a while. For fun and personal gain, you understand. You can attack me if you want, Techno,” he adds casually, and Techno pauses in his slow stalk forward, “but you’d just be hurting your brother. You know I’m not lying; if you saw the wings, you probably saw how we’re bound. Anything done to me is done to him in equal.”

Dream doesn’t see any wings, just like he can’t see whatever it is that’s very furiously vibrating against his side. The latter is definitely real, though, so doesn’t doubt there’s just something he can’t see.

Tubbo hisses something that sounds distinctly similar to that crawling nest of insects Techno’s crew brought down weeks ago, and now Dream’s the one holding tight to Tubbo’s arm, if only to stop the kid from throwing himself at—not-Wilbur. Mind-controlled Wilbur? A Wilbur who can mind control, and has wings?

“What wings?” Dream says, eyes narrowed.

‘Wilbur’ blinks, and then goes, “Oh, right—that must be the old man’s work, and you’re not one of his, are you?”

Dream assumes he’s referring to Philza, because that’s Wilbur’s dad. Except that doesn’t make sense, because Techno’s sworn up and down that Philza has nothing to do with any of this.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” ‘Wilbur’ continues, and he does something that makes the air  _ crunch _ around him. It’s like a plastic bottle being crushed, with colors crumpling and breaking against themselves. In the rumpled space they leave behind, something jagged and uneven emerges, long and arched around him in a menacing display, taller than the figure they frame even when half-folded shut.

They  _ are _ wings, in a way—if someone stripped some wings down to the bone and then stomped all over the remnants and then rearranged the broken parts like a wrong puzzle. Dream, so recently a bird, feels faintly sick at the sight of them.

Tubbo snarls again, and Techno lashes out with his knife only for the blade to bounce off the hardened wings.

“It’s like you actually want to kill him, and not even with my help this time,” ‘Wilbur’ says. Techno visibly hesitates, conflict warring over his expression as ‘Wilbur’ turns to Dream. “Wanna hear another—haha, hey, Tubbo! Wanna hear another fun fact about this power I got?”

He looks at Tubbo like a predator does a tiny meal, and on reflex Dream shifts into a lion, shouldering Tubbo behind himself and roaring defensively. 

“No, I don’t,” Tubbo says.

“Too bad, I wanna tell it.” He opens his mouth, but Dream has long grown sick of his talking and pounces, cutting ‘Wilbur’ off as his claws slam into the wings hastily furled defensively in front of him.

Dream regrets it a moment later when he realizes that all the sharp edges of the broken wings are pointed outward and have torn his paws to shreds on impact, but it doesn’t stop him from pushing harder, fangs bared.

“You’re so rude, attacking me like this,” ‘Wilbur’ says, and  _ flares _ somehow, a trickle of gold-white light flashing over his silhouette. It quickly turns red and crackles menacingly as it gathers up, and Dream tenses, bracing for the blow—

Black and silver light race up the sides of his vision, and the crackling subsides.

Dream drops back, startled. His form feels weirdly tingly, so he shifts back to human to check that nothing’s gone terribly wrong, only to realize that he’s… glowing. It’s quick to fade, but the lingering light is unmistakable.

It leaves a faint scent of banana nut muffins. Bad’s power, then, guarding his life as it always has. Dream’s never seen it glow before, but he appreciates it nonetheless. (It only sparks to life when Dream’s own capabilities would fail to save him, but that realization won’t set in until later.)

“Is that  _ another _ one?” breathes ‘Wilbur’, and the interest in his voice makes Dream’s hackles rise. He does not want this person showing interest in Bad. “Man, what is it about this place that attracts celestials? It’s like a bunch of moths and a streetlight out here.”

“Celestials?” Dream wants to correct him, to explain that Bad’s power is just a passive protector that doesn’t have anything to do with space, but he also doesn’t want him to know anything about Bad, so he holds his tongue. 

“I can’t believe oaths canceled out,” ‘Wilbur’ says petulantly, glaring at Dream like he’d personally offended him. “And after I goaded this one into overreacting, too… Ah, whatever.” His wings flex with a sound like rasping sandpaper and clattering marbles, and nearly half of their massive expanse just splinters off.

Like molting, if daggers were feathers. None of the misshapen shards reach the ground, though. Instead, they catch themselves midair and levitate steadily upward, until there’s a swarm of floating weapons with the sharp edges pointed at them.

It’s about now that Dream thinks he might be a touch out of depth here. He mentally flips through his catalogue of potential animals to turn into and finds nothing that falls under the  _ can withstand being stabbed a bunch of times  _ umbrella. He could dodge, but Tubbo’s right there, and moving out of the way feels wrong.

The wing fragments pivot in place, like drill tips. “If you want something done right,” ‘Wilbur’ intones boredly, “then blah blah, can’t rely on others for shit.” And the daggerlike shards shoot upward with all the speed of arrows loosed from a longbow, arching high before they turn and come whistling back down.

Dream turns his back to them and pulls Tubbo in, hoping at least to shield the younger boy from the attack. If Dream gets stabbed, he gets stabbed; he’s not going to die. The same goes for Techno, no matter how shellshocked he looks. He isn’t so sure about Tubbo.

Tubbo is reaching for something, though. It doesn’t—it doesn’t look like anything, and in fact trying to pinpoint where his hand is going makes Dream’s eyes sting, but whatever it is, Tubbo is intent on getting his hands on it. “Philza,” the kid says, nearly inaudible under the whistle of falling edges, “Philza, you promised—”

The daggers never fall. 

In its place, thunder rolls in. No, not thunder. The sounds are too spaced out, too regular to be thunder, they’re—they sound like  _ wingbeats. _

The wind howls, and a shadow falls over them.

“Phil!” Tubbo shouts, and Dream lifts his head to see white light and black feathers,  _ proper _ feathers with vanes and quills, a flood of wings all twisted together in a cluster and haloed by the sun. He can track about a quarter of a wing before it bends out of sight, impossibly long, and absolutely nowhere in that figure does he see Philza he can recognize as Philza.

At least, not until the form flies down. 

Between one blink and the next, half the wings have folded themselves away, and an otherwise human Philza stands in the center of it all, his silhouette ablaze with light intense enough to set the ground aflame. Liquid gold washes over Dream and Tubbo and Techno, but the heat is gentle when it brushes by.

This close, he can see that the feathers aren’t just black—they’re  _ space _ , with stars and planets dotting the endless void every here and there. 

Tubbo is holding one. It’s the huge, the size of his whole arm at least, but it’s still hard to focus on. Dream has to want to look for it to even have a chance of keeping it in sight.

A gnawing thought creeps up on Dream, and it stumbles out of his mouth before he can think twice, because Tubbo had grabbed it before Philza’s arrival: “Did you know?”

Tubbo startles at being addressed, and looks at him with wide, guilty eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but that’s enough of an answer in and of itself, really.

The ground is littered with the fallen dagger-bone feathers, which shudder away from Philza’s fire and skitter back towards ‘Wilbur’. “A bit late to the party, aren’t you, pops?” the man says, his dead wings reassembling themselves.

“Get out of him,” Philza says. Commands, really, with a threatening flick of his endless wings that whips the wind into a howling gale, but ‘Wilbur’ does not budge.

“Don’t bother with the theatrics,” he says. “We both know you can’t do anything to me.”

“Phil?” Techno says, voice wavering from its usual deadpan.

Philza looks over to him, and from this angle Dream can’t see the expression he makes. There are too many wings in the way. “Techno,” Philza says, sounding regretful or apologetic or both, maybe. 

‘Wilbur’ snorts. “What a way to find out you’ve been living with a liar,” he says, and Techno scowls at him.

“Stop it,” Philza says, and with a ringing note like a struck bell, the cane in his hands sheds its wooden shell to reveal a gleaming silver sword. The fire stokes itself higher around them, and the crackle of its flames sound like a whispering song.

“Oh, wow, a sharp stick.” The dead wings fall apart again, briefly, thousands of splintering bone twisting through the air, and suddenly Philza’s single sword seems lackluster in comparison. “How scary. Put it away, Phil, you’re going to make a scene.”

“Stop using Wil,” Philza says.

“I don’t think I will. In fact, I think I should complete this family gathering,” ‘Wilbur’ says. “You can’t do anything about it out here, can you, Philza? I’ve got you, I’ve got  _ me, _ I’ve even got Tommy.”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, Tommy stumbles into existence beside Wilbur. “What,” he says, squinting into the sun.

Tubbo jolts so hard he nearly tears out of Dream’s grip, shouting, “That’s not Wilbur, he’s fake!”

“I am  _ very _ real,” ‘Wilbur’ says, as Tommy whips his head around to stare at him, and recoils—registering the bones so obviously out of place. “You believe that I—”

A high-pitched  _ shriek _ of metal cuts him off, and then several things happen at once.

Dream claps his hands over his ringing ears, Techno runs out from where he’d dragged the edge of his knife against Philza’s sword, Tommy sees him, and sees  _ them, _ and—

Thunderless, lightning consumes the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO ABOUT THAT MCC HUH
> 
> dadza did so well i'm :pleading:
> 
> anyway im just letting the plot go where it wants. "whats happening" man idk i just work here! i have a destination not a route but i hope you enjoy the ride nonetheless
> 
> i just hope i dont forget something dumb ahaha... ha.......


	4. catching

The thing is, Tommy’s not stupid, right. 

He’s seen weird things happen. He’s survived some incredibly unlikely shit. 

And, above all, he’s known Wilbur for most of his life. 

So when Tubbo says he’s a fake, and Techno makes the most awful nails-on-chalkboard type screech with his knife to shut him up, and apparently-fake-Wilbur smirks with an unfamiliar twist on an otherwise familiar face, his fingers digging into Tommy’s shoulder, Tommy does the only thing he can think to do. 

He takes that sparkling humming energy in his core, cranks it up as high as he can bear, and sets it free. 

Static builds like an inhale, and the exhale is an explosive  _ scream _ of electricity as it leaps from Tommy’s skin with all the intensity of a lightning storm, energy streaming out in every which way. 

His heart stutters in his chest as the wild current goes roaring through him, but the snap and crackle of its power makes not-Wilbur flinch back. His hand leaves Tommy as that winglike structure moves between them to shield from the electricity, leaving Tommy free to turn on a heel and sprint for where Dream has his body curled around Tubbo protectively. 

Normally, Tommy would go towards Techno, but since Techno is next to Philza and Philza has wings and not-Wilbur also has wings, he doesn’t want to risk finding out that they’re not-Techno and not-Philza, too. 

Dream sees him coming and lets go of Tubbo, who reaches out and catches Tommy when he comes barrelling in. 

“Tommy!” Tubbo cries, wrapping his arms around him in a hug. There must be a ton of static and leftover power crackling at him right now, and it probably doesn’t feel too good, but he still holds Tommy tight, and Tommy doesn’t tear himself away.

“What is  _ happening?” _ he demands, craning his head to look back at not-Wilbur and maybe-Techno and maybe-Philza. “Is that—who else is or isn’t real?”

Tubbo makes a helpless noise. “I was just taking a walk! I didn’t think I’d run into anyone, but then Wilbur comes out of nowhere and says he’s doesn’t need to sing, and then he makes Techno appear out of nowhere, and—”

“Maybe a shorter version, Big T—”

“—try to kill me, and Dream stops him, and—”

“Tommy,” Dream interjects. “Did you know about this?” He jerks his head in probably-Philza’s direction, and Tommy imagines he’s referring to his wings specifically.

“I don’t know  _ nothing,” _ Tommy informs.

Tubbo frowns. “But that means you do know something,” he starts, and Tommy shoves his whole hand into Tubbo’s face to stop him from continuing on a pointless tangent.

“Listen, Tommy,” Techno calls over. “We—we know that this is Phil. But that’s not Wilbur.”

“How do you know?” Tommy demands, and lightning snaps eagerly across his silhouette as his nerves kick up another notch. “They’ve both got wings!”

“Good fucking point!” definitely-not-Wilbur declares, spinning around to grin widely at maybe-Philza. He pays no heed to Techno circling closer, searching for a weak point in his defense. “Hey  _ dad, _ how’re you going to prove that you are what you say, huh? You  _ lied. _ How is anyone supposed to trust you anymore?”

“If it means anything,” Dream breathes, barely loud enough for just Tommy to hear, “he did save us just now. And… I think Tubbo knew.”

Tubbo bites his lip, but when Tommy turns a disbelieving gaze to him, he crumbles. “I did,” he confesses, “since he wiped out the… but it’s not like you think! He just wanted you guys to bring it up with him first.”

Not-Wilbur interrupts them with a theatrical groan. “For fuck’s sake, you all are irritating,” he grumbles. “Let’s take this someplace a bit cooler. Maybe”—Techno leaps back towards Philza, knife outstretched to make another unholy screech of metal on metal, but he’s too far to get there in time, and the words leave not-Wilbur’s mouth unimpeded—“we’ll just go up a couple of miles.”

The ground drops out from under them.

Tommy screams, clouds slipping from his fingertips, his stomach immediately turning in protest. He likes roller coasters perfectly fine, but there’s something a little different between that and just an outright free-fall towards a ground he can barely make out. 

In his stress, his sparks kick up a few notches. Before he can get a handle on his power again, he sees a human figure out the corner of his eye suddenly shrink into a large eagle, struggling to reorient himself (Dream, Tommy assumes) in midair. After a moment, Dream dives towards Tommy, probably with the hopeful intent of catching him.

Unfortunately, because Tommy does not have his thoughts in order, the lightning in the air around him snaps out on instinct. It’s not like one bird would’ve been able to pull him up in any capacity anyway, but seeing Dream’s eagle form wheel away in a blitz of static makes Tommy feel all the colder as the wind roars past him.

But just as suddenly as he started falling, he stops.

The wind still races by, because the thinner air up here does that, but it’s not as intense as it was before. In fact, by the time he registers that there’s something soft buoying him up, most of the air current has been closed out by that same silken dark material. Whatever it’s made of is speckled with stardust and crisscrossed with tiny lines of light, and it does not let him fall.

They’re feathers, Tommy realizes, his hands fisting in quills as long as he is tall. They’re warm. They move under his touch, shifting until it is not a wing but an arm looped under him, and he’s not grabbing feathers anymore but the mundane clothes of his father.

“I’ve got you,” says Philza. His many wings furl inward, closing out the terrifyingly cold sky, until all Tommy can see is Philza and Techno and Tubbo and the view of space as would be seen through a fractured pane of glass. As though the night sky folded itself into the day just to catch them, just to save them. “I got you,” Philza repeats, unflinching from Tommy’s electrical field. “You’re alright.”

High above them, not-Wilbur darkens the sky with the expanse of twisting bone at his back. It bears no resemblance to the gentle void of Philza’s feathers, and Tommy feels silly for ever mistaking one as anything like the other. This—Philza’s arms around him, wings bracing Tubbo and Techno, his gaze fixed on the threat above them—this is safety. 

This is home.

In a sense, of course, not  _ literally. _ But it’s enough that Tommy doesn’t lock up, and the static around him fizzles out.

The cluster of bones around not-Wilbur thin out slightly, scattering like a flock of birds. Unfortunately, it’s still enough to keep him aloft, and the extra bits start spiraling downward towards them like pelting hail. 

Tommy has a split instant to stiffen in preparation, but Philza raises his sword defensively across them and says something in some language that skips over his hearing, and a wave of flame sighs outward from the silver blade. The blaze buffets back the bone shards raining down, but does nothing for not-Wilbur himself turning in the air to dive at them.

Philza swears under his breath and shifts, and suddenly Tommy can’t see anything as a swarm of feathers move him away from his dad’s arms, his grip on what had just been Philza’s clothes once again clutching onto feathers instead. The wings all press in close, hugging him tightly, but it’s not claustrophobic. It doesn’t feel constraining, not with the depth etched and displayed in every feather.

This close, it’s easy to see that the thin lines of light aren’t supposed to be there. They sit above the stars and cosmic dust, not a part of their nature but a symbol of weathering on the surface. Each feather is a peek into space, and the lines mar the view not by changing what’s shown but by damaging upon the feathers themselves. 

It reminds him of an x-ray of a broken bone, except for it being dark where the cracks are, it’s light.

He doesn’t like that much.

A sudden jolt reminds Tommy that he’s suspended in the air with only Philza’s incomprehensibly large wings keeping him from plummeting to his death, and even then, he thinks he can tell that they’re heading downward. Visually, he’s so securely surrounded by feathers, that he can’t see anything else, but he can hear Philza’s voice reverberating around him, demanding, “Put those claws away—what are you even trying to do? You already have your own body, leave Wil’s alone!”

There’s a ringing sound, like a bell struck by a rough mallet, followed the thinner clicking of dried bones rattling. Tommy paws through the feathers, emboldened enough to want to see what’s going on, but the wings never seem to end. They don’t want to let him poke his head out where it’s dangerous. 

“I think getting a name would be a good place to start,” not-Wilbur says.

Philza makes an incredulous sound. “Nobody kept their names!”

“None of you had the right to have one  _ struck _ from them,” not-Wilbur spits, in a sudden bout of bitterness. It melts quickly into a cackle, though, as he continues, “That’s all I was going to do, really—revoke that ban—but you’ve really got a special boy here, don’t you? He turns creation’s ear even when he doesn’t know how to talk to it. Forget my name. Between his power and your stupid oath, I can do just about anything.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Philza says, and the wings around Tommy shudder. The pitching sensation of a fall has him grabbing around for something solid to hold onto, something more than feathers. They must be outright  _ plummeting _ now, and only the inability to see exactly how fast they’re hurtling towards the ground keeps Tommy’s brain from flipping out with panic.

“Tommy!” he hears, and turns to see—Tubbo, half-obscured by a wing, pushing past it to reach him. His face is lit by the starlight coming off the feathers, a faint splash of familiarity in this unfamiliar situation.

Quickly, Tommy grabs him by the arm so they don’t lose each other in the well-meaning swathes of feathers. He can see his own confusion and worry reflected back at him from Tubbo’s eyes, and tries to gather his courage instead. “Tubbo,” he says, “can’t you fly?”

“I didn’t really get the chance,” Tubbo says. His glamour goes out a few times, showing those iridescent insect wings vibrating against his carapace. They look infinitely fragile compared to the thick wings surrounding them. “Philza jumped in when we started falling.”

And they’re falling because not-Wilbur made  _ one _ comment on it. Right. 

Tommy still isn’t completely sure what’s going on, honestly. He’d been minding his own business, playing games and eating snacks, and now… this. Wings and fakes.

_ I think Tubbo knew, _ Dream had said, and Tommy hesitates.

There are probably better times and places to ask, but they’re incredibly close and all these feathers say that they’re incredibly safe, too, so Tommy figures he might as well. “Tubbo, about Phil—”

“I knew,” Tubbo says, and then winces at the startled look Tommy gives him. “I-I never told you, because I hadn’t realized, but you know when you took out my—that hive? You didn’t take out all of them. Some must’ve been away on patrol or something and just didn’t make it back in time. I, um.” He lowers his voice. “Hive memory saw Philza wipe the rest of them out.”

Philza, with an old wooden cane and eyes full of laughter. Tommy finds it hard to resolve that mental image with the idea that he’d finished exterminations that Tommy had started. 

“I was scared of him,” Tubbo admits. 

Tommy’s heart pulls a complicated trick in his chest. Somehow, he manages the words, “Are you still?”

Tubbo smiles at him, a glimmer of mundane reassurance in the midst of cosmic safety. “No,” he says. “He likes us too much for that.”

* * *

Fighting the possessed body of his son while carrying three passengers in his wings is about as difficult as Philza expected it to be.

His greatest weapon—his oath:  _ no harm unto mine where their hearts find solace, sinew or soul, _ in rough translation from words of creation—can’t do anything to Wilbur’s body. It can burn away parts of those dead wings that keep pelting down, it can spark the flame that lights Philza’s blade, but it can’t touch him.

As is, Philza’s already stretching the boundaries of his capabilities. His wings would creak in protest if they could, and every now and then a flicker of pain wracks its way up his spine, his own soul upset and in turmoil for both failing the protection he swore and daring to bare steel at someone he is meant to protect.

They’re intact enough to let him maneuver as he wishes, though. He shifts the orientation of some wings, careful to keep his passengers concealed behind at least two layers of feathers, and angles himself neatly out of the way of the possessor’s next rush.

Wilbur’s body goes plummeting past him, unnatural claws (just sharp bones hovering over his hands, honestly) failing to clip him at all. Meanwhile,  _ Philza’s _ whole body screams at him to catch Wilbur too, but he knows that if he tries he’ll just spill blood or ichor onto those jagged wings following Wilbur like a broken comet tail. Still, it’s tempting up until the dead wings pull him out of the stoop again.

“You’re  _ not _ this agile,” says Wilbur’s voice, with the resonant intonation of someone trying to get something across to creation.

If Philza’s wings were anything less than they are (which is to say: realer than flesh-and-bone, larger than life, bound not to his body but the half-remembered history of his soul), those words might’ve been enough to pluck them from his back.

As it is, Philza swerves around him and continues his steep dive to the ground. He’s fast. He  _ knows _ he’s fast.

He doesn’t know how fast the possessor is. He doesn’t know if he used to, if they used to be in the same flock of celestial bodies populating the above before the other one fell. (It’s unlikely, but the possibility lingers. Nobody knows. Creation hadn’t bothered keeping track of the above and below even before the collapse, when the center of its mass sits here.) 

He’ll bet that he’s faster, though, because his wings are solid—albeit twitching and cracked—and he’s had his body for longer than Wilbur’s been stolen.

A mile of distance off the surface of the earth goes by in a blink of a thousand eyed feathers. Philza breathes a little easier as he pulls out of his drop, finally opening his wings and gently depositing Techno, Tubbo, and Tommy onto the grassy ground. 

Well, gentler. Tommy does end up upside down on top of Tubbo, but that’s his fault for moving around so much.

He’s still got plenty of spitfire, though. Tommy scrambles back up and points accusingly at Wilbur’s body that circles them from above, demanding, “Alright, not-Wilbur, where’s real Wilbur? Give him back!”

“He’s right here,” says Wilbur’s voice, laughing. He turns on a skeletal wingtip, wheeling in for another strike, and Philza rushes up to meet him midair. Gold and white flames rush off his silhouette only to extinguish against Wilbur’s skin, barely more than a breeze, and the taste of iron rises slowly in the back of his throat. “Man,” Wilbur’s voice continues, “why do you all have to make such a big fuss of this, anyway? Just imagine it as your brother taking a vacation from you hovering fucks.”

Philza’s sword cleaves through a flimsy layer of bone and halts a hair’s breadth over Wilbur’s neck of its own accord. “Get  _ out,” _ he says, and chokes back the urge to cough.

“Why Philza,” Wilbur’s body says in utter delight, and Philza is momentarily distracted because the spectral horns curling off his skull are no longer spectral. Anyone can see them, now. That can’t bode well for Wilbur. “Is that  _ blood, _ Philza? Are you hurt by this?”

“Phil?” Techno calls up, alarmed.

“Your wings aren’t looking too hot, either,” Wilbur’s voice singsongs. The bones knit together again and shove Philza back. “Are you shedding yet?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Philza says, suddenly struck with the realization that it’s probably not great for the health of the body to host a corrosive soul whose very existence is the antithesis to the protection carefully written into its blood. The longer this lasts the worse Wilbur’s body will get, and it will technically be Philza’s fault.

If nothing else,  _ that _ would be the thing that makes the double-edged nature of his oath turn on him. 

“Not yet, I see,” Wilbur’s voice says. “We’ll reach that point soon enough.”

“Or we could avoid it altogether,” Philza says. He takes a deep breath, ignoring the growing pinch of tightness somewhere in his lungs, and stretches his wings out. They tremble, ever so faintly, but only near the tips. None of his sons will see it, and he’s grateful to have the strength to keep them from worrying, at least.

“You can’t avoid it,” Wilbur’s voice says, and creation locks that into fact. “It’s not like any of you could force me out.”

“No,” Philza agrees. But the devotion of protection is a sacred thing on its own, the first and deepest of bonds, even before he wrote it into the lining of his soul. “Wil could, though.”

“Wilbur?” the stolen body scoffs.

“Wil?” Tommy says, hope like a drop of dew in the sunrise. “Where is he?”

“He’s  _ right here, _ like I said, do you not know how to listen?” Wilbur’s body says.

“You’re a liar!”

“Not about this.”

The worst part is, Philza doesn’t think he’s lying. He hopes, at the very best, that Wilbur is asleep, because if he’s  _ awake, _ if he’s aware of those wings and that malicious intent and can’t do anything to stop it—

Wilbur’s body doesn’t move, but a couple of bones duck into the nearest plane where a broken feather lies. Only Philza can see that, and only he flinches before the touch connects, and—it’s like bringing an open flame to a raw nerve, but he clenches his jaw against the pain. 

The only hint of weakness he shows is the way several wing suddenly seize up, curling in, and the cracks spanning their surface widen. Philza shakes them loose, trying to brush it off as an innocuous motion, but halfway through hears the telltale whistle of bones through the air. He looks up to see Wilbur’s body hurling itself at him and thinks,  _ oh, no. _

“Dad!” comes two-toned, and Philza’s heart kicks up into his throat. Sheet lightning and a battered, mortal knife catch the bones before they fall on wings that shouldn’t feel this heavy, and Techno’s monotone rises several octaves as he continues, shouting, “Wilbur, stop it!”

“Wilbur can’t hear you!” the body retorts. “And even if he could, he can’t—”

“Shut up!” Tommy interrupts, “You said he’s here, and if you’re not lying, then let us  _ talk _ with him, holy shit—Wil! You’re hurting dad! Make it  _ stop, _ Wilbur!”

A flicker of warmth pulls a little strength into Philza’s wings and he arches them over their heads, shielding his sons from another rain of bones trying to stop them. “I don’t know if that will reach him,” he says to Tommy, who bares his teeth at him with something like fear and confidence mixed together.

“Only one way to find out,” Tommy says. And then, even louder, “Hey,  _ Wil! _ Stop ignoring us! Pay attention!”

“Ah, yes,” Techno says with an urgent kind of breathiness, “because annoying him into getting up always works and doesn’t just make him do something to deafen himself or mute you. By the way, Phil, in case you missed it or something, you’re  _ crying blood.” _

“From where,” Philza says on instinct while Tommy says something like  _ oh so that’s not normal for you oops, _ and then realizes that’s a stupid question. He would’ve said wings if it were anything but the two eyes on his face. 

That’s weird, actually. He feels like he would’ve noticed if he switched to using his wings to see. But when he brings a hand up to his cheek, he does feel a line of drying blood. And when he tucks his wings in a little, shifts his focus to  _ see _ see, he does have to blink a film of red away. The world looks flatter from this perspective, the other planes easing out of sight.

“That’s new,” he murmurs about the blood, and Tubbo lets out a strangled laugh somewhere behind him. 

“Oh, that’s just step one,” Wilbur’s body says. “You’re going to fall so hard, I can practically  _ taste _ it.”

“Shut up,” Philza says, and Tommy whoops in what he probably thinks is great encouragement. The reality is that he’s tiring much faster than he should be—it’s an uphill fight against himself—and the possessor doesn’t even need to  _ do _ anything to make it worse. He’s already won, in a way; it’s up to them to take it back before it becomes permanent. 

“Well,” Wilbur’s body says, shoulders rolled back in a mockery of relaxation, “if that’s all you guys have to bring, I think I’m just going to head on my merry way. I don’t have to deal with you guys.”

And—no, he can go  _ wherever, _ Philza can’t—he draws in a breath and exhales stardust, wings lifting, the stars within them pulling into alignment. The low embers lingering around them abruptly stoke themselves into a proper wildfire, tongues of flame weaving into a net that passes over Wilbur harmlessly when it closes around him. 

“Was that supposed to so something,” the stolen body says, just as it passes over him again, again, again, seemingly futile until something… catches.

“There you are,” Philza says, as the body itself frowns. “Stealing isn’t becoming. C’mon. You know who you are.”

* * *

Wilbur opens his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yall i fuckin CALLED something but i can't say it because it's spoilers but just. know that i heckin called it. anyway can i get a DADZA POG that resolution & climax because holy shit that was good
> 
> also!! [guys look at this super cool art](https://subwalls.tumblr.com/post/635094939046412288/wings-unfurl-and-unfold-and-dont-stop-expanding) by [teahound](https://tea-with-veth.tumblr.com/) it's so pog <3 
> 
> and im lowkey setting up a tumblr for this account for update funsies ig but go reblog that art it's absolutely insane!


	5. waking

Wilbur’s eyes are open.

They’ve been open for some time, now. Or maybe they opened just a breath ago, nudged awake by the sensation of a warm flame seeking him out. It’s gold and flickering and reminds him of home. When he cradles it, it blooms into something a little stronger.

But it doesn’t matter, really. Either way, Wilbur does not want to look. 

_ That’s right, _ says a voice not his own, as he slowly lets the hazy warmth slip away from him. It reaches for him, but he doesn’t or can’t reach back, so it inevitably goes out.  _ You don’t want it. You don’t want to see this. _

His eyes are open, though. Just because he doesn’t want to doesn’t mean he can’t, doesn’t mean he  _ doesn’t. _ He can already hear familiar voices calling out for him, and he feels like he’s moving, and he can barely make out the blurry blotches of light and color that’s supposed to be his sense of sight. 

He doesn’t want to see, but he  _ needs _ to know. What is he doing? Why is he moving? Numbness crawls through him like static, but it’s not enough to blot out the growing sense of wrongness that winds itself tight in his chest, pressure building with nowhere to go.

This can’t continue. He can’t just leave it like this, with everything unfocused and distant, with a weird detachment between what’s happening and what he feels. 

In this state, he can’t panic. Not truly. Or maybe he can, and he just can’t feel it—neither option bodes well. 

He expects himself to be panicking at this point, though. The routes of his own anxiety are familiar enough that he recognizes when and where it tends to swell and wash over him in an all-consuming wave, and this is one of those situations. Just because he cannot feel the pace of his breath or the speed of his thoughts doesn’t mean he isn’t spiraling. Just to be safe, he decides to assume that he is.

Among the numerous ways to ground himself, the easiest is to focus on the things he knows. All he has to do is list some facts, starting from within himself and working his way out.

Easy, right? His name is Wilbur. He grew up with Techno and Tommy, and they bonded because they all had a little magic that others didn’t. They were adopted by Philza. Philza’s voice sounds like—like what he’s hearing right now, actually. If he strains, he can hear the other two, too. 

He doesn’t know where they are. He doesn’t even know where  _ he _ is; falling, maybe. He remembers falling. 

There’s a hook in him somewhere, a tiny thing of golden flame that leads a gossamer string straight to him, and for all it flickers like weak candlelight, it also reminds him of home. 

It’s not something he can touch or reach for; when he tries, it flickers out of view, like something he can only notice when he’s not looking for it. But it’s there, he knows, and the world crystalizes around that fact, shifting a little closer into focus. Now he can see his father’s face, upturned towards him, a bead of sweat on his brow. Somehow, he’s backdropped by a view of space itself, if space were spotted with eyes.

They’re looking back at him, piercing, and Wilbur feels a little more of the world sharpen into clarify. It’s not a backdrop of space, it’s a backdrop of  _ wings, _ countless and endless, and—Philza swings out of his sight, like someone turned Wilbur’s head for him, and he sees Tommy sparking with barely leashed energy. 

He’s shouting, but it sounds like it’s been filtered through an ocean’s worth of water, and all Wilbur can make out is that he’s stressed.

Wilbur, on instinct, makes an attempt to respond. He still can’t feel anything, but he swears he moves his jaw and tongue and pushes air through his throat. He should, at the very least, hear his own voice—and he does, more clearly than the others! Just not—not coming from the right spot, and not saying the right things. The flow of the speech, where the emphasis hits, doesn’t match what Wilbur is trying to say. 

He stops talking. The voice keeps going.

That one isn’t his, then. It just sounds like him. Wilbur tries again, and thinks he can make out  _ some _ sound coming out of himself, just not quite right. It’s hard to hear, and impossible to understand. Not melodic enough, maybe.

He wishes he knew how the other voice-like-his is managing to be heard so clearly. That one isn’t singing, he doesn’t think. He’s not sure how singing would even  _ help _ in something like this, but without awareness of the air in his lungs and the rate of his breathing, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to.

Wilbur drifts there, for a bit. Thinking and not thinking. Listening, mostly, to the voice like his prattling on in the distance. It sounds  _ remarkably _ like his own, now that he’s heard it for longer. Nearly identical, he’d wager, but there’s something different about it all the same. 

He listens more. There’s a different tonal quality to it—a certain note to it that rings, almost, like a clocktower bell.

He could imitate that, probably. 

Maybe. 

Wilbur tries to say something else, his mouth forming the shape of his brother’s names. He still can’t hear it properly, so he tries again, and again, and—

The issue, he thinks, is that he can’t feel anything. Staying focused is an effort, and sometimes he can’t tell if he misheard or simply missed hearing something, distracted by the wavering colors slowly drawing in and out of focus.

He can… he should be able to change that, right? He can sing things into happening. That’s what he does. He sings.

Opening his mouth, Wilbur tries to make it change. He thinks of notes, of a musical scale winding through the air in perfect pitch, but trying to keep a tune in his throat feels impossible when everything he sounds out dissipates like mist in the sunrise. 

Frustration is a distant beast, closing in but still too far to worry about. Wilbur knows he needs to lock himself and his intent down somehow. One thing at a time—if he cannot sing the problem away, he can at least solve the first step the mundane way.

He keeps talking. No sound makes it out intact, but he keeps trying, repeating the phrase over and over and hoping it turns itself, alchemy-like, into a song.

It doesn’t, of course, but the more he repeats the same thing the more he notices that the other voice says it differently. A different tonal register, so to speak—he doesn’t know how to copy it, but he repeats words over and over while thinking of that other tone in the hopes that he’ll at least get close enough for them to be real.

There’s a tingle in the back of his throat the next time he tries. 

_ —feel. _

He said that. He did! And he heard it! He says it again, and this time he hears half of a  _ let _ before the tone slides out of his grasp again. Nailing it down for a whole sentence is hard, but he’s got it now, he knows he does.

Wilbur licks his lips, wets his voice, strings together the words in a tone he does not understand:  _ let me feel. _ It holds, barely, like the sentence just barely clips into this strange range of hearing.  _ Let me feel, _ he tries again, and he can definitely feel that odd note in his voice grow stronger with every iteration.  _ Let me feel. Let me feel. Let me feel. _

_ I can feel. _

The world turns. A choir of sounds rise up, dust on metal and the wink of a star, and Wilbur shakes under the devotion of it all, realizing for the first time that creation heeds his call not with reluctance but with an eagerness of a pet to a beloved master it had thought gone.

  
_ I can feel, _ he says to it, and it sings back something that, to him, sounds like an enthusiastic  _ yes. _

* * *

Techno is breathing hard, but not bleeding yet, miraculously. 

Mostly because Philza has been shielding all three of them every step of the way, stepping in whenever the fake tries to turn and confront anyone that isn’t Philza. Techno hasn’t been able to get close because of it, and also because those undead wings of bone keep driving them all back. Those things are dangerously agile and lethally sharp, and Techno’s especially wary of getting himself torn open on those.

Come to think of it, he doesn’t even know what he’ll do once he gets close. Grab the lapels and try to shake the real Wilbur back, maybe—or look into his eyes, searching for any hint of the brother that should be there, and try to persuade him to come back.

Or just pummel the fake one out of him. That seems like the most direct and actionable route.

If there were ever a moment to do it, that moment would be now; the fake is shaking off whatever flame it was that Philza threw at him, squinting like the blaze did more to his sight than to his body. 

“You really want to drag this out, huh?” the imposter says, waving his hands through the last embers with scorn. “Fine, let’s play a little longer. You know, I’ve always wondered what happens when someone like you contradicts yourself, Philza.”

Techno takes a breath, and darts out from under the cover of Philza’s wings before a response can be uttered. He hears his father calling out to him, alarmed, but the suddenness of his charge means that the fake doesn’t have time to bring his wings around. 

Slamming his fist into the fake’s diaphragm, Techno drives the breath out of him and thus eliminates the possibility of being talked into doing anything stupid. He then sweeps his legs out from under him, knocking the fake to the ground while he’s still wheezing for breath.

His knife burns in his offhand like a brand, but he hesitates to bring it down. “Wil,” he says instead, urgently. “Wilbur, come back.”

_ (Let me feel.) _

The fake’s wheezing turns into strained laughter, somehow, and the bones lift themselves from the ground and arch around, braced to drive through Techno. He doesn’t move, though; it’ll be a pain, but it’s not like it’ll kill him.

That is, until the bones shift and arrange themselves into something like a pincer that clamps down on his knife arm and drags it closer.

Immediately, Techno tries to throw himself back. He scrambles so hard to get away that he nearly dislocates his own shoulder, but he can’t get free, it’s got him so tightly that it draws blood where it digs into his skin, and this is even worse that before. At least when he forgot that Tubbo was anything but someone to kill, he’s just blanked through the incident—right now, he’s not forgetting. He’s aware; he knows; he still can’t do anything to stop it.

A dark feather flashes in out of nowhere and cuts through the bone, sending shards scattering everywhere and freeing him. Techno flinches back, everything in him poised to move away, but then Wilbur grabs him, and when the feather comes in contact with him, it loses all momentum and flutters to the ground.

“Aw, you got so close,” the fake breathes out, and his grip is much stronger than Wilbur’s has ever been, and—

His knife sinks into Wilbur’s gut.

_ (Let me feel.) _

Techno sees red, blood splattering between them. 

And then the fake opens his mouth, and then he sees  _ red. _

* * *

_ (Let me feel.) _

The pain is a blessing.

It cuts through the numbness much like the knife it was born from, and when Wilbur drags in a ragged breath he finds that he can feel it, just like he can feel the bruises blooming all over his skin in places he hadn’t realized were hurting.

That staticky pins-and-needles feeling falters in the face of such sharp pain, and Wilbur’s sense of self drags itself together until he’s finally  _ aware. _

As in, he’s aware that he can’t move anything. He’s aware that his body is moving without him, that his eyes rove without his permission, that his voice is saying things he isn’t. He’s aware that he’s bleeding and that the pain is spreading, molten and furious across his nerves, and it’s a good thing he  _ wants _ it, wants to cling to that pain and use it to chip away at whatever cloudy confusion it is that stubbornly lingers.

His breathing doesn’t even match his own. It makes him question, for a moment, if he’s really breathing, or if he’s approximating the action in a space where it’s both impossible and unnecessary.

He can’t quite convince himself to stop it, to test that.

In his line of sight, he sees Techno stunned and—Techno has never been helpless, really, and never will be, but—he looks like he’d prefer to be anywhere but here, with his weapon buried to the hilt in Wilbur’s gut.

Someone screams, distantly, and it sounds like Tommy.

_ Techno, _ Wilbur calls, but his voice hisses out, “Vicious little blade, aren’t you? You’d stab your own brother—you’re just a weapon to be aimed and let loose, and you don’t care who’s in your way.”

Wilbur strains to move his tongue and lips and they don’t obey him. He can already see the rage flooding through Techno, and as much as he’s grateful for the clarity this stab has given him, he doesn’t really want to endure any more, and if Techno loses sight of who is and isn’t an enemy… 

Well, Wilbur kind of is an enemy at the moment, isn’t he?

A red and white shirt fills his vision, following by a flash of light so thunderous it seizes all of his muscles and sends him flying back, away from where Tommy has his hands outstretched and his teary eyes wide, lightning still crackling along his fingers.

Wilbur’s body lurches back and then  _ up, _ somehow, hovering over his family standing tense on the ground.

His eyes pass over Philza and his enormous wings boredly, but Wilbur wants to stare, now that he has the coherence to actually take them in. He feels, somehow, as though this isn’t as much of a surprise as it should be. Those stardusted feathers look right, spreading from Philza’s back, like they’ve always been there.

It occurs to him that his own back aches. His head pounds, too, like someone’s trying to drill holes into his temples. How whoever it is that’s in control of his body can just ignore it is beyond Wilbur, but he grits his teeth through it.

Philza is the only one who comes up to meet him, wings nearly spanning the length of the sky, and he’s holding a sword that reflects a red flame that can’t be seen outside of the silver metal. 

“Predictable,” Wilbur’s voice says, and his vision tilts downward to where Tommy has a hand on Techno’s arm and is trying to say something to him. There’s movement, a shift of muscle somewhere Wilbur isn’t familiar with, and then several streaks of white bone dip under Philza to beeline for his other sons, and—

Wilbur barely sees Tubbo, glamourless, dive in with his iridescent wings beating so fast they’re just a blur, before a sense memory takes over.

A clean black suit. Withered arms. Twisting horns.

In the burned-out hive. There’d been a figure standing over all those dead insects, and when Wilbur approached, he’d—there was—a glimpse of soot—he remembers bones.

He remembers blinking, and seeing nothing at all, and being too tired to investigate. He remembers words but not where they came from, or who spoke them.

He thinks he knows who spoke them, now. Not the name, but the  _ entity, _ the thing piloting his body in his place.

Another flash of brightness yanks him out of his thoughts, and he sees a cascade of oddly fluid flame like a roaring beast lurching towards him. It ashes all the bone pieces in the way, and on instinct Wilbur wants to close his eyes and hide, but the light is too kind to sear his retinas. It washes over him with warmth so intense it  _ almost _ burns, but it backs down to a comfortable temperature immediately after.

It doesn’t want to hurt him.

Or, he thinks, as his vision is brought to a heartbroken-looking Philza, it can’t.

“See?” his voice says, dragged out of an unprotesting throat no matter how badly Wilbur wishes he could shut his mouth. “This is all your oath does to you—you can’t do anything when it  _ matters. _ Don’t look so surprised when you’re the one who shackled yourselves to a bunch of dumb kids anyway.”

“Don’t call them that,” Philza snarls, wings flaring. There’s still tongues of flame leftover, lapping across the feathers like it’s preening them for him, before they flicker out. 

“They are, though. And it’s your fault. You just let them walk into a bunch of lesser ones who made their home in the abyss and didn’t even have them check for things like  _ me _ while they were there? For shame.”

Something cracks. Wilbur can hear it clear as day, it’s like glass, except it came from nowhere at all and everywhere at once. The only visual beat that matches with it are the lines spiderwebbing over Philza’s feathers.

And then the words sink in. 

Philza bound himself to them? What does that mean?

He notices a feather.

He doesn’t see it, really, because he can only see where his eyes are looking, but he’s suddenly aware that there is a feather beside him, and he’s only aware of it because it’s warm and growing warmer. It’s not a real feather, he doesn’t think. It’s less than real, like he is, watching his body move and speak under someone else’s hand.

In the same way that he cannot physically sense the feather but can notice it, he notices that it spontaneously combusts.

Again, the heat feels like it should be more than it is, and it’s gentle where it flares out and brushes past him—

The touch explodes across his vision in a flare, firework-like, and his attention pulls out of focus to fixate on that instead. The sight it leaves lingers only briefly, but he can see the gossamer strands again, glittering, this time more clearly than ever. They stretch to connect him to Philza and Techno to Philza and Tommy to Philza and Tubbo to Philza, and… 

An oath. Bonds.

Wilbur feels very small, and very intrusive, seeing this. Like he’s just peeked into something near and dear to another’s existence, something no outsider should ever set eyes on.

The world sings to him, but the heavens are silently watchful.

Wilbur squeezes his eyes shut. There’s a way around this, he knows, and the very thought of it makes him want to sob, but he thinks of Tommy’s fear and Techno’s clenched jaw before Tubbo yanked them out of the way, and—

_ Philza does not protect me, _ he rasps, and the reverberant bell of this incomprehensible tone has never sounded more like a death knell. This is a lie, and every part of him wants to protest it, but if this is the bond holding Philza back, this glimmering thread between them, then… Wilbur will break it. He has to.  _ Philza does not protect me. Philza does not protect me. I’m not—I—I’m not his son. _

_ He does not protect me. _

_ He can hurt me. _

_ If he wants, he can even…  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
> sorry?


	6. calling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> enjoy, and sorry for the delay <3 love you!

The awful thing is, Philza almost doesn’t realize what happened. 

He’s busy choking down blood and steadying his wings, trying not to show how much it took to send out that latest wave of divine flame. Every flap sends jolts of pain shuddering down his spine, tiny packets of agony that shake him from the inside out. He’s afraid to stop now, though. The moment he relents, he might fail. He might  _ fall. _

The oldest part of his soul, the part that he can’t remember much of, is still scared of falling.

The lingering embers of his attack crackle around him, setting the ground aflame without burning anything at all. They prefer not to damage precious things or innocent lives, only the things made to hurt and enact violence upon others.

Philza doesn’t know if they’d burn him, in his current state. He’s not eager to try, and thankfully doesn’t have to, because they still obey him when he beckons for them to die down. Whether or not he still falls within their tolerance of innocence is debatable, but at least they heed his command. A sigh of relief swells in his throat as he lowers his arm. 

It’s in the midst of this motion that his oath—the very thing threading the fabric of his soul to the stars and feathers leftover from the above—changes.

The problem isn’t that Philza isn’t paying his oath any attention, but rather that he’s overly sensitive to it. Any hint of wrongness from the change is swallowed up by the overwhelming relief as his wings suddenly lighten, a burden lifted from him without warning or reason, solar winds renewed below his wings and boosting him higher. Warmth chases out the chilling pain in his bones and drowns out that quiet tweak of his oath resettling and that brief thought of  _ wait, what? _

Startled at this sudden improvement, Philza flicks his wings a touch too hard and catapults right past Wilbur’s body instead of directly at it like he meant to. It’s only by the barest last trailing wingtip that he manages to clip those jagged bones and disrupt the posessor’s attempt to skewer the kids below, sending bone shards spinning as they scatter into the air before pulling themselves back together in a shattered wing. 

This second wind is a surprise, but it’s one Philza thoroughly takes advantage of. Without the pressure of blood and ichor in his lungs he is free to twist in the air, perfectly agile. His sword shrieks a brilliant crimson as it drives down.

Bones crunch and burn and the possessor yelps, recoiling. “How,” howls Wilbur’s voice, “you—stop being so bright, what the fuck—why are you rising? Fall!  _ Fall! _ Hurry up and fall!”

Philza does not fall.

Instead, he closes his fist around one of the horns curving off of Wilbur’s skull. It  _ burns _ into his palm as it flickers, foreign tongues of flames trying to squirm out from between his fingers. It’s not real enough to touch—real enough to see, and to be burned by, but not enough to be permanent. 

He lets go of it, and his scalded palm drops to Wilbur’s hair. 

The contact prickles uncomfortably against his skin, like he’s too close to an open flame, but it’s odd—none of it sinks into him or rises out of his bones like it did before. The pain isn’t coming from within him, only from outside.

That can’t be right.

The possessor swings those dead wings around with the intent to drive every bleached-white shard through Philza’s heart, and somewhere down below Tommy is screaming, but Philza barely looks back. His wings shrug off the attack with thick feathers and bursting stars, renewed and strong and buzzing with that cosmic song he’s nurtured all his life.

“Let him go,” Philza says.

“Nah.”

“Give it up,” he says, impatiently, and his sword sings against his palm as he raises it.

“You’ll have to kill him first,” the possessor says with Wilbur’s voice and a stranger’s eyes. 

Philza can’t tell for certain if those are just words or if they’re Words, and he doesn’t have time to contemplate. Clicking bones descend between him and his quarry, and Wilbur’s expression twists in disdain an instant before the shards interlock and block him from sight.

A spike of panic juts through Philza at not having a direct line of sight to him; he’d lost the feather tracking Wilbur ages ago, first when it snapped and again when it disintegrated altogether, split off from his fading power for too long. If the possessor puts those damned wings to use while Philza doesn’t have eyes on him, Philza wouldn’t be able to stop him from taking off this time.

Swiftly, Phil cleaves his sword down on the bone barrier between them.

The divine steel crunches easily enough through the lackluster attempt at a shield and continues plunging towards the body without hesitation. No backslash slows the blow, which is odd, when everything in Philza should be practically seizing from trying to do something he’s sworn so deeply not to.

The sword isn’t slowing on its own, and his arm is still strong as it delivers the attack.

At the last moment, he turns the blade. It’s not the sharp edge but the blunt side of the weapon that slams into Wilbur’s body..

No force of the world softens the blow for him. The possessor yelps as the stolen body goes flailing downward, just as surprised as Philza is, and his sword nearly follows suit as his arm goes numb with horror.

Philza stares at his sword hand. It doesn’t shake, not now, but he feels shaky. 

He had to consciously declaw his own attack. He could’ve hurt Wilbur. He  _ would’ve _ hurt Wilbur if he hadn’t realized that something was off, if he hadn’t suspected enough to stop relying on the laws of his own soul to stay the blade for him.

Somehow, Philza’s oath has failed Wilbur. That has to be it, there’s no way to argue against this kind of proof.

A righteous fury roars to life in his veins and he whirls around, eyes blazing, and all but slams the possessor into the ground. Gently enough still that the stolen body would not be damaged, of course, but firmly enough that there is no escape as Philza’s wings pull in to close out the sky and the rest of the world and even his sons, hollering behind him.

It is just them: Philza, Wilbur’s body, and the possessor.

(And the wings, watching, and the heavens that watch through them. Wilbur meets its gaze, smiling sadly.)

Philza speaks first, and loudly, refusing to be talked over even though the other is trying to interject, ignoring his other kids shuffling closer to his wall of feathers from the outside: “I can’t feel him, I can’t touch or see the—I can  _ hurt _ him. I shouldn’t be able to hurt Wilbur. What did you do?”

“You know I can’t touch your precious oath,” the possessor snaps. “Only you can do that.” There’s a tinge of upset in that tone, childishly, the way a toddler might cry after a toy breaks in their own clumsy hands. Philza thinks of Wilbur, younger, pleading for his guitar to be fixed.

Except this isn’t Wilbur. This is someone else in stolen skin, with power and intent to harm. Whoever it is is wrong, anyway, because a celestial’s oath is a binding thing, and once Philza makes it even he can’t do anything about it. Trying to break it off would only cause injury, if not a fall from grace. 

Regardless, he doesn’t bother with corrections. It is not his burden to coach the purpose of the celestial into the unholy and unlistening. 

He drives the point of his sword through one of the bone wings in a mockery of a pin through a butterfly’s wing, piercing through to the soft dirt below. The countless little bone pieces aren’t truly trapped, having the flexibility to fall apart and reconfigure themselves away from the obstruction, but the blade’s violent firelight is a good enough distraction. 

Philza takes a deep breath, folds his wings in tighter, and  _ looks _ through the gaze of every feather. Some colors wash out, while others intensify. Souls light up the dark, his own and Tommy’s and Techno’s and Tubbo’s and a nearly unrecognizable dull dimming thing that must be Wilbur. He’s caught in the hooked claw of another soul, one as shadowed as Philza’s is bright.

Creation is a weave of constellations, in a way—connections and bonds drawn between atoms with as much fervor and variance as those between souls. The space between Philza and Wilbur lays empty and fallow, as though they were strangers and never meant for more. It’s wrong. He doesn’t know why, but it is, and he has to fix it quickly. 

Claws sink into feathers as the possessor squirms, bones rattling. They press up against Philza’s wings, hunting for a weak point to stab through, but without his oath strangling him and cutting his power short, he has plenty of strength to keep them out.

Philza tips a stream stardust into the expanse between him and Wilbur with a hiss of, “Wilbur Soot is my son.” The words echo through his wings, and a twinge of pain returns as the oath takes hold, cracks spreading across his feathers again.

And then it vanishes. The celestial power that should fold around Wilbur and bind Philza to him simply doesn’t. The stardust is lodged back within him as though freshly forged in the living contract of his oath, as though he’d never sent it out in the first place.

His wings are perfect and powerful and light as air as they quake with his anger and fear. He can’t protect Wilbur. Why can’t he protect Wilbur? 

He tries again, backing his words with every bit of intent and will he can gather, saying, “Wilbur Soot one of mine. I may not allow him to come to harm, be it physical or not, wherever it is that he calls home.”

Even speaking the breadth of the declaration aloud does nothing to make the oath hold. Everything he sends into the gap between them blinks away as though no word ever left his mouth to begin with.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Philza grits his teeth and turns his attention inward, resorting to the direct root of his oath. He cannot force the words of creation through a mortal tongue, but his wings remember how to write it, so he drags those quills over the countless planes adjacent to this one and plucks a feather from it. 

The feather tugs itself from his grasp at drifts towards Wilbur. But it barely touches that cluster of faint, suffocating sparks that make up Wilbur’s presence before it vanishes, returned to its place in Philza’s wing like nothing ever called it away. Again.

Still no bond. How?  _ Why? _

Philza has never had to troubleshoot his powers before, and it’s not like he  _ can, _ when they’re ingrained within him in a place too deep to remember, stitched together in a language too holy to understand. The only thing he can imagine as going wrong is… if something greater than him is cutting him off. 

There’s not many of those left. Entities like himself or even the possessor in control of Wilbur’s body are technically on equal standing when it comes to the planes—for something to actively deny Philza, it would have to come from something like the world, or reality, or even the weight of creation itself.

Wilbur’s voice can change that, he knows.

But the possessor hasn’t said anything. He’s just gloated, played around with his food like a caged predator finding enrichment for the first time, made an abortive attempt to escape before Philza closed a net around him and tried to stir Wilbur from whatever it is that holds him under—

Wilbur. Unless it’s Wilbur. If Wilbur is awake and present enough to use his power, somehow, then that could be why. If Wilbur found a way to use it without his physical voice, if he thought this was the only way out, if he’s rejecting Philza’s protection with vehemence that borders on hate… 

No. No, it couldn’t be. Wilbur shouldn’t have reason to make himself so vulnerable, to spurn Philza in every way that matters.

Something clangs noisily off a blade, and Philza looks up to Techno blocking bone shards with his knife, parrying each one as best he can. It’s messy but thorough work, and not a single piece makes it past him. “Phil,” he says urgently, “can you get that thing out of him? Can you get Wil back?”

Philza swings around, tucks a wing under Techno and lets the unending feathers carry him away from the next onslaught despite his squawk of surprised protest. “I don’t know,” he says, maybe too low to be heard. 

Freed from the temporary pin, Wilbur’s body hurtles towards him, unnatural claws poised to tear past soft feathers to reach the yielding skin beneath, curved horns lowered to gore and rip. Philza spots him from the trailing edge of a wing and swivels his sword around, raising it to his lips.

Like this—unburdened, unbound—he could be strong enough to tear that body open and yank out the parasite and crush it under any wing or foot. But even as his voice begins to form the name of his sword, he falters. He can’t, he knows he can’t. He wouldn’t be able to assure Wilbur’s wellbeing like this, not when there is nothing between them that can tell him where Wilbur begins and ends.

“Awaken,” drips from his lips only to immediately sour like curdled milk, and nothing follows it. The command does nothing without the name to set it free. Philza grimaces before sweeping his sword to the side, letting crimson flames and red-hot heat slough off the silver metal before they fade to ash and disappointment. “Wilbur,” he says instead, pitching his plea to carry over the sound of their struggle. “Wil, let me—”

A hand clamps down on his arm and yanks him aside, tearing him away from Wilbur’s body. Philza spins with a protest at the tip of his tongue, but Techno only tugs him further away.

Philza cannot fight him, not while their bond purrs through his veins and gentles his every move. “Tommy needs a clear shot,” Techno says.

“At  _ what?” _

The words barely clear his lips before he catches a whiff of ozone and burnt hair, and—a blinding flash cracks across the land, setting bits of grass aflame here and there, but most importantly crashing down on the figure that is Wilbur’s body. 

Philza’s heart does an anxious flip in his chest, but his wings remain unbothered. “That’s still Wil’s body!” he reminds Techno. 

“Yeah, exactly. It’s the same body, so we know exactly how much he can take,” Techno says. At Philza’s disbelieving stare, he adds, “We spar a lot, we know each other’s limits, don’t worry about it.”

“There are multiple things you said just now that I’m not particularly happy with,” Philza murmurs, but doesn’t elaborate. 

The smoking heap at the painful end of Tommy’s attack snarls and slowly stumbles back up. Wilbur’s clothes are definitely singed now, one part of his sweater still glowing faintly with heat, but the bones that fan out across his back bear no such damage. 

“I’m starting to get sick and tired of you,” the possessor says to Tommy, who’s now taking cover behind a tree with Tubbo. “Annoying-ass  _ insect.” _

“You’re really full of yourself for a ghost!” Tommy shouts from behind the tree, and Philza moves to stand between him and the possessor as he continues, “We could kick you over in a second, we’re just taking it easy on you!”

“Uh, Tommy?” Techno says. “Maybe we  _ shouldn’t _ antagonize the person who’s got Wil’s, uh, everythin’. Just a thought.”

“I’m not afraid of you!” Tommy hollers, as he is wont to do. “There’s only one of you, and you stole that body anyway!”

“He’s not wrong,” says Tubbo cheerfully, only to duck back behind the tree and pull Tommy with him when the possessor’s gaze shifts to glare at him.

Philza extends a wing between them. “This is your last warning,” he says, as though he has any idea what he could possibly do in this case.

“I doubt it,” the possessor says, sneering. A bit of that smugness returns. “Sworn or not, you’re pretty insistent that this guy’s your son. So what if your powers can do something?  _ You _ can’t.”

“You can’t do anythin’ either,” Techno retorts. “You usin’ Wilbur’s body just means we can’t go all-out. But Tommy was right about one thing, and it’s that we still outnumber you.”

A venomous grin that twists Wilbur’s lips, causing Philza to stiffen. “Are you sure about that?” the possessor says. “The abyss is so  _ close _ and so full of bitter hives. They remember you, you know. You destroyed their brood sibling.”

“They can’t get here,” Philza cuts in, voice tight. “You know that. That one colony was an anomaly that slipped through, but none of them can reach across the plans.”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” the possessor crows. “They don’t need to. The planes intersect here!”

“They do not,” says Philza, who can actually see them. The planes don’t run parallel, certainly, but no matter how much they twist over each other, they never touch—not until now, that is. The fabric of reality groans in his ear as it folds into itself to accommodate this request, the planes cramming together until one and all punch through each other. 

Philza’s wings, spanning across the different planes, promptly cramp up. He swears and shakes them out as more and more feathers pour into existence uncontrollably, the ground shaking under his feet.

“Look again,” the possessor laughs. Shadows deepen, darkening and lengthening unnaturally as the sun clouds over. It doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but elsewhere the tremor travels outward like a seismic wave, like a lure.

Distantly, Philza hears a sea of clicks and hisses, like chitin tapping on stone, like thin wings humming against an outer shell. A response. A promise.

Abyssal colonies would never pass up a chance as sweet as this.

Philza forces most of his wings away and turns, shouting, “Get out of here!”

Techno opens his mouth to answer, but Tubbo cuts him off with a shriek. He’s one of them, after all—no matter how advanced the glamour (which is shattering now, revealing a shiny shell and black-yellow stripes and twitching antennae), he’s still keyed into the hivemind wavelength. 

He’s had it quiet for a while, but now? Now, with the swarms trooping closer and closer, all in sync but for him, even  _ thinking _ will be hard.

“Go!” Philza insists, pushing at Techno with one wing and curling another around Tubbo gasping and Tommy grabbing him, trying to ask what’s wrong. “I’ll be fine, but the scouts will be here in seconds and I can’t—”

Something’s coming.

It’s not the same direction as the encroaching army—it’s not the same  _ thing, _ either, not silk-and-glass pinpricks of a soul that make up an ever-shifting whole. Insead, it’s darkbright like a solar eclipse, a soul that defies and redeems itself in the same breath, a darkness so gentle it could only ever nurture. Celestial on the brink of a fall. A halo smoldering, eyes burning, wings burnt and forgotten but still alive, despite it all—

Light tumbles down from somewhere and the shadows shrivel back, hissing. Philza remembers faintly that Dream had been protected by someone like him, and that he’d vanished after being teleported a mile above the ground with the rest of them.

And now, in parallel and opposition to his own flame-bright arrival, Philza watches the distant glint of an oathbound soul swell into immediacy, dark wings bumping into starry feathers, clumsily twitching away only to half-unfurl again as the bearer stumbles to the ground. 

Philza recognizes him. Even like this, half-holy and half-knowing, shedding sparks and shadow, one arm haphazardly thrown out to hold back a common swift chirruping furiously in the direction of Wilbur’s body, he recognizes him.

  
“What,” Bad says, “the  _ muffin _ is going on here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always I had no idea where this chapter was going until it went there oop. hope it was cohesive enough to be understood anyway haha—anyway special shoutout to [teahound](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teahound/pseuds/Teahound) and [chrysalizzm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalizzm/pseuds/chrysalizzm) because I love both of their writing a lot and they really helped encourage me to push through a couple of dry spells. ^^
> 
> also look at all this absolutely incredible fanart!
> 
> [by teahound!](https://tea-with-veth.tumblr.com/post/635088530136301568)  
> [by jaybird_wings!](https://peachy-n-bee.tumblr.com/post/635497082725220353)  
> [by spine!](https://abbus-r-us.tumblr.com/post/637194657177190400)
> 
> I appreciate all of you so much. thanks for sticking with me <3


	7. dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Philza has a duty.

Imagine, for a moment, the world. The sky above and the ground below and the people living between; simple enough, right?

It’s a symphony, kind of. All the different little parts work together to make a coherent, pleasant sound, though it’s impossible to tell where one movement ends and another begins, or if they’ve completed any movements at all.

Wilbur doesn’t think they have. Or maybe he just hasn’t heard enough to know.

Regardless—imagine another symphony. A different one, maybe composed by the same mind with the same instruments, maybe not. Either way, the songs are different. This one hasn’t reached an end yet either, and plays on in a room adjacent to that first orchestra. 

They both sound nice enough on their own, and sometimes a musician will duck from one room to join the other, but that’s fine. The music doesn’t collide. A careful hand might have been able to guide the orchestras into synchronization or syncopation, but this isn’t a gentle hand.

This is more of a bulldozer crashing through the wall, actually.

The soundproofing wall between the rooms rips down, shunting all the musicians into one great pit together, and the bulldozer lowers its blade at them and tells them to keep playing, never mind that they’ve lost their melodies in the discordance of the other. No wonder the notes falter and the songs suffer, no wonder nobody knows what to do.

Maybe one side is prepared for it, with a word of warning. And they’re overpowering, cohesive and strange and equipped with tools of the unknown and everything that a forewarning gives them. But the other isn’t. The other is held together by only a small family trying their best, and even their best might not be enough, and there are more walls and more orchestras and if it doesn’t stop here it maybe never will—

Wilbur watches the ruin his voice wreaks on creation, watches the world twist itself into painful contortions to suit the demands of his voice, and feels sick to his noncorporeal stomach.

(He’s still drifting, but he’s awake, no matter how much he doesn’t want to be.)

_ Make it stop, _ he says, and again does reality creak and groan and mutilate itself to accommodate him. He wishes he could close his eyes. He wishes he could touch the bristling edges of his father’s feathers and feel their warmth and sooth their anger without burning himself on their righteous fury.  _ I don’t want this. I… Take my voice. Take it, I don’t want it anymore, or remove the one I didn’t mean to welcome into control— _

—but he can tell it can’t, no matter how hard he pleads. Even he, who changes creation with a breath, has things he cannot change. Certain wings, certain souls, certain bones and feathers lay beyond his scope. If it were just his own, if he had full control, then maybe, but since he twined his blood around the fallen one’s will, he no longer has the final say—

_ —then, then!— _

—if he is too swift to resort to this solution then so be it, so long as it works, he can’t think of anything else—

_ —kill me, and let it die that way. If I do not write this symphony, if I cannot stop another from composing it, then nobody can. Kill me; kill us both. Someone. Anyone— _

—a warning comes, a gift of knowledge. Few and far between are capable of fulfilling that demand, he comes to know. Only those derived from once-powerful symphonies that have already fallen apart could drive death in deeply enough for this purpose, to purge both entities from his body the way that he wants—

There is only one person that Wilbur can ask this of.

(He can’t ask for permission. He will have to plea for forgiveness, after. After? No, not after—there is no after—he will simply have to exist with the guilt until they both cease altogether.)

_ Philza, kill me. _

* * *

In the nights after they razed that hive of oversized insects to the ground, Techno’s dreams were filled with incessant buzzing. The novelty of that particular horror tapered off pretty quick—they fight far too many things that growl and snap in the night for him to get too hung up over a couple of bug noises—and it hasn’t been particularly terrifying or anything.

He is, quietly, terrified of  _ this, _ though. Because this is different. 

That one fight was just a sound in the air. This, on the other hand, is a fine tremor that hums through the ground, made up of a bunch of individual little sounds overlapped until they all become one sussurant hiss. It echoes every click and tap and buzz as though a long, deep ravine were cradled around them, except there is no ravine. They’re in an open park, and only the loudest of whoops should reach an echo in the yawning sky above them. 

In other words, either there is a ravine somewhere that Techno can’t see, or there are enough hives around that they can fake an echo with sheer numbers. 

(The answer, of course, is both; their shadows yawn deep, and the bugs number wider than he knows.)

Techno squints at a shadow, where he thinks he sees a shiny shell flicker where there should have only been soft grass. He blinks, hairs on the back of his neck rising, and it disappears. 

The noise gets louder. It’s exactly like the hive they razed, but louder. Larger.  _ More. _

So even though that glimpse of a shell vanishes, shadows recoiling from the light that pours off the newest player in this battleground of theirs, Techno doesn’t feel particularly confident.

He recognizes the newcomer as Bad and the bird as Dream, of course, and he knows they’re skilled fighters. The problem is that Dream is like Techno; one on one, they’re unbeatable. But against a swarm, a flood, an army? They’re one of the weakest pieces on the board. Their reach only goes as far as they can physically reach, which means they can’t crowd control, which means they can’t clear great swathes of area even temporarily, the way Tommy can.

As for Bad, Techno doesn’t even know what the guy is or isn’t capable of. He assumes those dark wings twitching at his back put Bad on something of the same level as Philza and the thing controlling Wilbur, but Techno has avoided the man a little too well to know anything else. 

It’s a little validating to know that he isn’t as harmless as everyone thought he was, though. Maybe he hadn’t caught on about Philza, his own parental figure, but at least he’d noticed that Bad was more than just glowing protection and censored words and muffins.

If nothing else, at least Bad doesn’t even need to do anything for the darkness to cower a little. The buzzing softens marginally as Bad looks around, as though shying away from his attention.

Philza, answering him, says, “Someone has possessed my son.” His expression twists around  _ my son, _ as though the words left a bad taste in his mouth, or reminded him of something unpleasant. “And he’s just opened us to the abyss—do you remember what that means?”

“Sounds familiar, I don’t know,” Bad says, eyeing the unnaturally deep shadows. The bird that he’s holding back from making a go at Wilbur’s eyes twists around and twitters furiously. The chirps are intelligible to Techno, but Bad must understand Dream in his transformed state somehow, because he says, “Yeah, but you left halfway through, so I—”

“What the fuck,” says Wilbur, controlled in such a way that Techno’s throat aches for him, “you’re barely more put-together than I am, how are you doing that?”

Bad blinks, confused. “Doing what?”

“Doing—you don’t even know?” Wilbur sneers, and those bony wings push outward only to dig into the soft earth. Shadows grow under them like spilt ink, and the buzzing gets louder again. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. You can’t stop this; you can’t stop me. The paths are still open.”

Anything that could’ve been said in response is cut off by a high, shrilling shriek, and Techno nearly leaps into Philza’s feathers in his haste to get away from the  _ legs _ wrenching themselves out of his shadow, dripping goop and slime as though having dug through liquid darkness to breach the surface. 

He barely has time to swing his knife and slice off a piece of exoskeleton that got a bit too close for comfort before those feathered wings tense around him and pull him away, tucking him close to Philza’s back as Philza positions himself between him and the oversized bug. 

“Get out of here,” Philza demands, and Techno’s not sure if he’s talking to them or the scouts lurching closer. Honestly, even if he were willing to leave, Techno’s not sure where they’d go. Philza clearly doesn’t intend to budge, and Tommy’s somehow ended up next to him along with a shaking, glamour-less Tubbo. The dozen or so insectoid creatures that have hauled themselves out of the darkness encircle them, leaving no route by which they could actually leave. 

Even Bad, whose arrival brought enough light to offer temporary reprieve, flinches away from the colony scouts as a few turn towards him. Saw-toothed mandibles clack aggressively as they close in, emboldened by the way Bad’s light ebbs the closer they come, right up until Dream’s form twists into a lion and he plants his paws in front of Bad to roar back.

“There we go,” Wilbur says, unbothered, “isn’t that better? Much more space to, ah, stretch those wings and shake that abdomen, huh?”

“What the fuck,” Tommy hisses to Techno, probably because Tubbo’s too busy clamping his antennae down like he’s trying not to listen.

“Don’t get split up,” Techno starts. He’s cut off by a humming sound from one of the bugs, and he spots a shiny ridged shell on one of them split open.

To sets of translucent wings peel out, crystal-clear and veined in black. Immediately, several of the others do the same, though not all of them have the same body parts, it looks like. A few seem to have traded the ability to fly for bigger bulk or long, arching stingers. 

One such stinger lashes up into the air, and then the bug lunges with six segmented legs pointing at them like harpoons.

Techno says, “Tommy,” but his brother’s already on it; with gritted teeth and a crackling flash, lightning leaps to collide with the creature in midair, and the good thing is that it stuns the thing enough to stop its charge.

The bad thing is that most of the others immediately whirl around to turn their attention on him, and there’s still that background chorus of buzzes and hisses that only grow louder. This is just the start, the scouting party made to notice and report back to the hivemind. Techno remembers this from Tubbo’s hesitant explanation on hives, and how one set of compound eyes seeing something means they  _ all _ see it. 

Gauging from the sheer cacophony building around them, that ‘all’ is probably a  _ lot. _ Whatever dimension it is that they come from, there’s a lot of them, and they won’t stop.

Feathers rush past Techno’s line of sight, glowing as though backlit with flame, and Philza knocks a good few from the air with a sturdy clout. There’s still some unspoken conflict warring across his face, but as Techno ducks out of Philza’s protection to drive his knife through a chink in another bug’s exoskeleton, that conflict falls away to resolve.

Philza straightens. He lifts that oddly bright silver sword up to his lips as though to press a kiss to the deadly edge, but instead he only whispers to it. “Awaken,” he says, barely audible, and then—something—a sound that means a name but Techno can’t nail it down to letters, not when it leaves his ears ringing and his eyes dizzy.

He shakes his head clear just in time to see the glistening metal glow red-hot, crimson flames pouring off the blade. The fire washes outward, wrapping around them for a moment and making the insects  _ scream _ as it rakes over their bodies, turning tough chitin to ash in seconds. 

The flames reach even Wilbur’s wings, embers catching in dry bone and somehow finding enough kindling there to keep burning. He growls and shakes them out, but they cling persistently, and—there’s a crunch to his left, where Dream’s lion form locks jaws around a mandible and drags the whole thing to the ground. Bad raises his own flames, similar to but a little less certain than Philza’s.

And Philza—Philza is a  _ star _ of heat and wind, wings arching long and wide and breaking up his silhouette until he’s almost impossible to make out. One flap whips up enough of a gale to send the flying scouts off course, screeching as they struggle to stay airborn, and when they inevitably bump into those endless feathers, their carapaces burn. 

Grim satisfaction is a vicious look on Philza, but a well-suited one.

Wilbur snorts arrogantly, and Techno wishes he had some way to stab the controller without actually touching his brother. The flames have been put out by now but they’ve left part of the previously ivory-white wings scorched grey and black. “Way to traumatize your kid all over again,” he says, nodding over at Tubbo.

Tubbo looks up from where he’d been hiding his face in Tommy’s shirt to  _ hiss, _ wings buzzing in aggravation. “This is  _ your _ fault,” he says, bravely pushing through what must be incredible amounts of mental pressure from the colony members attacking them, with countless more on the way. “We don’t want you, we want to take— _ no, _ we want—we want Wilbur back, and the world how it was.”

Wilbur rolls his eyes. “Oh, nobody ever wants me, but here I am anyway. Why do you get a say over who gets a body and who doesn’t, huh?”

“That’s  _ Wilbur’s _ body!” Tommy all but explodes, incensed enough to crackle electricity over his skin. Techno scoots a step away while nobody’s looking, wary of getting zapped. Just because he’s pretty sturdy, doesn’t mean he has the thick natural armor that Tubbo does, and Tommy’s static actually does sting no matter how much he ribs on the younger kid for his less powerful sparks.

It’s Philza who cuts in first, though, putting a curt stop to the building storm of Tommy’s frustration. “Wilbur should be aware and able to revoke whatever deal he inadvertently struck with you,” he says, grip white-knuckled on the wrapped hilt of his sword. “Especially as it was an uninformed decision.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. He’s under  _ my _ protection.”

“Is he?” taunts Wilbur’s voice, and all of those space-themed feathers lift up with Philza’s crackling, bristling anger. “Seems to me like he doesn’t want you. Doesn’t want anything to do with you, actually.”

Philza visibly bites back some unkind retort, and instead swings his gaze over to Bad. Eyes narrowed, he says, “Bad, how well do you understand what you see here?”

Bad hums. For the first time, Techno realizes that although his wings are the same dark shade as Philza’s, they’re not feathered like his. A thick membrane spans the arching length of one leading edge, tapering off to a bony point somewhere too far to see clearly. “Enough, I think,” he says.

“Bold claim for a swordless, featherless thing,” Wilbur says, but Philza raises his voice over him, over even the growing, rhythmic buzzing that crescendos louder and louder.

“Keep the abyssal colonies from ripping my children—and yours—apart, please,” he says. The tip of his sword raises up from the ground again, gleaming red, a trickle of flame still spiraling off its razor-sharp point. And then, in a blink: wings flash, as though every window to space in those feathers suddenly turn to fixate on the nearest star, and the air folds, and heat wraps around Techno’s sore body like a reassuring blanket, and—

He barely catches a glimpse of Philza and Wilbur colliding with what looks like steel or ivory between them before all the wings sweep in, and they vanish from sight.

There’s a beat, another shudder of light, Bad’s wings barely visible in the eclipse of feathers, a halo flickering in and out of view, a brilliant glow slowly fading. 

… The world falls quiet.

* * *

He doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t want to do this.

It’s not fair, he shouldn’t have to do this,  _ fuck, _ how could he have let it get this far? 

He shouldn’t have to do this.  _ Wilbur _ shouldn’t have to endure this. This shouldn’t have happened at all; he should’ve been more careful, quicker on the uptake, tighter on the guard, faster to break and tell them about a history even he knows only the broadest strokes of—but he knows he couldn’t have, because he chose to preserve his kids’ freedom over even their own safety, and this is the price he pays for loving them enough to let them go.

This is not a price he can cheat.

This is not a price he would dare squirm out of paying.

(But he still doesn’t want to do it, and it’s the human part of him that cries, the heavenly-turned-mortal that found a bond worth loving even when all the magic in the world was stripped from it.  _ I love him, _ wails that part of him,  _ I protected him, I raised him, is that not enough to keep him? Is that not enough to deserve mercy? _ )

(The part that belongs to the shattered above acknowledges only its next duty: there is a threat to the souls he is bound to protect, and it must be stopped. It is as simple as that, really.)

Philza’s sword rests at the base of Wilbur’s neck, all but blazing, its edge sharp enough to pierce skin and flesh and soul and fate. “I do not make empty promises,” he says, and for once he does not taste iron in the back of his throat when he stares at the possessor through Wilbur’s eyes. 

“Isn’t that what your first one turned into? You swore it to the sky and the sky fell out,” Wilbur’s voice singsongs, and the horns curling off from his temples seem to spiral out longer, tighter. Philza remembers that the broken halo of someone fallen grows longer the deeper they fall, each jagged side trying to reach the other, only to fail miserably.

In this case, it means conviction. It means he doesn’t believe Philza will go through with it. Doesn’t think he’d dare.

On some level, Philza would never.

On another—it is not a matter of would.

It is a matter of  _ must. _

Philza exhales and his blade drives forward and in a split instant the rest of the world falls away, the veil tearing open along the blood dripping down the length of his sword. He drags as much of himself into this one plane as he dares, meeting Wilbur’s slowly horrified eyes with thousands upon thousands of his own. Wings cover every inch of skin, feathers pinning their blazing glare at the body and unnaturally twinned souls before him. 

If anyone could see this from the outside—they would see nothing at all. Just a moving window through space. Just stars, galaxies, creation yawning languidly into the void, unbothered by the goings-on of the tiny lives dotting such a small portion of its existence, its ancient interest piqued only by the roiling supernova of a celestial body fulfilling its deepest duty.

Creation looks, so time drags its heels, cocking an ear like a dog to a silent whistle. 

Philza lowers a wing and the sword is but another feather that folds itself back into the many, light and flame singing along the edge of his silhouette, and he is standing on nothing with only a tangled mess of blood and power in front of him.

The unholy snaps at him when he draws near, blazing too bright and hurting too much, but the mortal parts of it lean in, and—it’s still just one body, stumbling, lurching towards him in equal parts fear and eagerness, hope and desperation in one.

Humans are supposed contain multitudes, yes. But not like this.

Never like this.

Philza advances, closing the imaginary distance between them. Primary feathers drag through the void the way a sword would drag through the dirt, and there are stars in his veins and love in his soul. 

Anyone else would tremble under the watch of creation. But Philza has done this before, he thinks. He must have, because the movements are familiar. The thoughts are familiar.

His wings are steady. He knows what he must do. (Creation croons, incomprehensible, but somehow it reminds him of Wilbur’s voice.  _ Philza.) _

No doubts. No hesitation. Only the singing call of his oath, duty alive in his eyes.

He strides closer.

Fear overtakes Wilbur’s features, panic tracing the edge of his expression as his mouth opens and someone else’s voice pours out of his chest, a voice he recalls brushing wings with, once upon a time: “He’s going to remember this, you know.”

Philza does not stop.

The body that should belong to Wilbur Soot falters. A sound like a sob wrenches out of that throat, and those limbs twitch like they’re trying to get closer, like they eagerly await the grace that Philza’s wings will bring. Still, the speaker gathers enough confidence to sound waveringly triumphant. “He’s going to remember that his old man struck him down with heaven’s rite,” says the unwelcome, the unwanted, the unnamed. “He’s going to remember that you lied to him, and then betrayed him, ran him through like it was nothing—”

“He’s my  _ son,” _ says Philza, flames twisting in a snarl across several feathers. How could this be nothing? Are his wings not a burden in and of themselves, despite their current wholeness? Is his duty not a choke chain, his oath not the sky on a titan’s shoulders? 

Flame and light harden every feather. Philza watches the possessor’s undead wings pull back, watches the horns twist and curl and strain, watches the bones shudder as divine flame threatens to come between them and their vessel. 

_ (Kill me, _ sighs a voice on a wind that cannot be heard.  _ Kill me, do it, kill me, Phil, kill me please do it do it now Philza Philza kill kill kill—) _

And Philza—

—sometime, somewhen, in a flock of celestial bodies, was the one being known to twist flame into a blade and bend death to his will, deathless to an extraordinary point, and he—

—lunges, sword swept to the side—

—with pride, somewhere, a vice but an earned one, an allowed one:  _ the airstrike, the undying, the angel of death with war under one wing and blood under another, and countless others folding in and stretching out, a sword that sings as it— _

—sinks home.

(The first strike rends spirit from flesh. The second splits soul from soul.)

He stops. His blade hums with the intent and strength of his oathbound duty, and impaled on its long blade are three figures: a body, his son, and an intruder.

When he says, “Awaken,” he does not get to choose which ones catch flame.

* * *

Faced with defeat and death incarnate, the cruel and selfish creature turns back to its roots.

_ All creation’s love, _ it wagers,  _ for you to say yes. You heard their devotion; would you turn down the cry of the stars that miss you? A world that loves you? Everything that matters, once again at your heart—all for you, if you say yes. _

Wilbur, still weeping from the choirs he can no longer hear, creation slipping through his fingers like blood through a torn sieve, thinks of an electric grin and of bloodied hands and a hug that warms him from the inside out. He says,  _ I don’t want to hear it. Anything you have to offer, I already have. _

And it goes. He is alone, with something burning in his chest.

The sword looks up at him.

_ There is nothing to forgive, _ Wilbur says.

The sword looks up at him.

_ He would have died and failed to save them, _ Wilbur says.

The sword looks up at him.

_ Of course not, _ Wilbur says, confused. He looks down, sees not a silver blade but a blue one, tongue-in-cheek laughter and a gemstone sheen haloed in red and black light, and it crumbles away, and a silver point comes to rest right over his heart—

  
— - - -  _ sings. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I SWEAR IT'S A HAPPY ENDING OKAY JUST HOLD ON
> 
> if you don't like happy endings feel free to pretend it ends here idk
> 
> also this is something I've been sitting on for literal months now but listen. I actually wrote phil stabbing wil before it happened in dsmp canon. like literally 2 days before it happened. you have no idea how much i was like WHAT.
> 
> also also, fanart shoutout again! because i appreciate it so much!
> 
> [by teahound!](https://tea-with-veth.tumblr.com/post/635088530136301568)  
> [by jaybird_wings!](https://peachy-n-bee.tumblr.com/post/635497082725220353)  
> [by spine!](https://abbus-r-us.tumblr.com/post/637194657177190400)


	8. returning

The flames billow up, and for a blessed moment, all Philza can see is scarlet. 

And then they descend—on  _ him. _

Heat races up his arms without warning. Philza recoils from the sudden burn with a hiss, dropping his sword before its hilt can sear through his palms, but that doesn’t stop the fire from sweeping over his shoulders and snapping at his face in a blazing fury. 

Alarmed, Philza pulls his wings back to extinguish the wildfire with a quick gust, but his dropped blade doesn’t even get a chance to hit the ground before all his feathers suddenly seize up. 

A sharp crack lashes through them. His wings splinter, shrieking with pain until they’re all but  _ screaming _ with the rage and agony of a purpose violated, of immediate regret, of a wrongness so deep it bites down to the marrow, poisonous enough to rot him from the inside out. 

Philza doubles over, gasping against a pain more familiar than it should be. He can’t pin down why, can’t bring his thoughts into focus while his wings spasm and crack against his control, every part of him in confused uproar. 

Against his will, his wings close in. They’re splitting at the seams, breaking apart with the furious insistence that it’s a problem with  _ him, _ something deep in the weave of his soul that cannot stand the thought of—of bringing down that sword—

—of hurting Wilbur.

He… can’t hurt Wilbur. That’s part of the oath. His oath.

If that’s what’s causing this, then—Philza gasps, reaching blindly into the space between them that was so recently empty, and finds not fallow void but swelling power returned and raw and roaring.

Wilbur must have relented. Philza’s devotion is a constant standing declaration, renewed by everything he does with every breath he breathes. It’s not so trivial as a bucket in constant need of refilling; it is an endless river rushing, a tall waterfall tumbling, a massive glacier crumbling into the sea that feeds it. Formality is an added force, not a necessary one. 

So if Wilbur did not or could not maintain his undoing of the bond, whether by will or by death, then at last the bond would not be reversed the moment it was created.

And so the oath finally locks Philza in—Philza, who already has a blade through Wilbur’s heart, who just tore him in three, who moved in accord to his deepest duty only to have the action betray it instead, turning his power against him, angry claws catching on feathers and eyes until he bleeds ichor into the sky.

Born in contradiction, the bond  _ burns. _

Philza catches a breath between his teeth, jaw clenched against the pain. So occupied is he with turmoil, his thoughts boiling over from confusion to understanding to horror, that he never once thinks of the disc of light dimming against his hair, his hat tumbling from his head as the ground pitches beneath him, the sensation of  _ falling _ sending his wings into a fluttering panic.

None of that particular brand of fear reaches him. Instead, terrified for the vanishing life of his son, he stumbles closer to Wilbur laying divided on the ground. That gossamer thread straining and bucking between them means nothing; death only cuts a bond in one direction, and Philza is still breathing. He needs to see. He needs to check.

Maybe the flames only turned on him because there’d been nothing left to burn on the other end of the blade. His sword had slipped out of Wilbur’s form before he’d even let go, but after it already stabbed through, its sharp edge repelled the moment the bond had clicked back into place, a moment too late. 

And now: three silhouettes in one.

Philza’s vision wavers, and he blinks. No, not three. Two.

Two silhouettes, because the third is a crumbling of ash already carried away on a breeze. There is blood in the grass and stars in the sky and diamond shards dissipating into light and, against all odds, a beating heart in Wilbur’s chest.

Wilbur looks up at him, half curled around his own slumped body, and his eyes are blue, blue, blue.

“What,” Philza says, and then,  _ “how,” _ and if he sounds broken he can’t do anything about it—what a miserable sight he makes, leaking ichor from shattered wings that try their best to huddle miserably against his back, and the ones that don’t fit just droop limply from plane to plane. His sword smolders away on the ground as it loudly rejects him, but Philza hears none of it over the whispery  _ ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump _ that means Wilbur is still alive.

Tears blur his vision, but not enough for him to mistake the semi-split body and spirit staring back at him as anything but his son.

Wilbur says,  _ Who was that? _ in a tongue not known to humankind in eons, a musical trill of a question that lifts Philza’s soul to hear.

“Wilbur,” Philza says.

_ No, I—what? That’s  _ me. _ I’m talking about the other— _

_ “Wilbur,” _ Philza says, voice cracking, and he holds out a hand. A wing sweeps forward despite the pang of agony it sends flashing up his spine, the broken-feathered limb brushing over Wilbur’s soul with the terrible creaking tremble of a bridge bent too far. “Wilbur, I’m sorry.”

Wilbur stops, mouth still half-open with a word on the way out, eyes wide. He feels cool against Philza’s feathers, or maybe he’s normal and Philza is feverishly hot and half a degree from combusting from the howling ripping wave of his furious oath. None of that means anything when Wilbur stands up from the still-breathing body empty on the ground and all but throws himself into Philza’s arms, something between a laugh and a sob bubbling up between them.

_ Phil, _ he says, full of love and light and something Philza dares not call forgiveness or apology,  _ Phil, I just had the worst nightmare. _

“Wasn’t a nightmare, mate,” Philza chokes out. He has to be careful, because any move too fast might tug Wilbur just a touch too far from the flesh and bone he left behind—he’s less real like this, split and drifting—but Wilbur has no such reservations and squeezes Philza so tight he thinks he might burst. “Wil, I…”

_ I know, Phil. _

Philza’s heart clenches. “I—”

_ You would have let him kill them, _ Wilbur says into Philza’s ear, chin hooked over his stiff shoulders,  _ because he wore my skin, and you could not stop me. I know. _

There’s a sound like shattering glass and a collapsing star and feathers flaking off by the hundreds, by the thousands; Philza drags in a breath that rakes through his lungs as sand and smoke. Not one failure but all four yank at him until he teeters at the edge of a cliff, far closer to falling than he’s ever been before. 

He could fight for balance, argue his case, beat his wings until they decay into bones and send him spiraling into the abyss—or he could close his eyes and let it devour him from the start. Start looking up. Start walking.

What’s a bit of a fall compared to the love of his family, anyway?

“I couldn’t,” Philza admits. He looks away, but his rapidly fading feathers watch as Wilbur puts a translucent, ashen hand on his shoulder.

_ I know, _ Wilbur repeats simply.  _ It’s okay. I let you do it, in the end. _ His lips quirk into a wry smile.  _ Wasn’t really a matter of ‘would’ by then, huh? _

Philza says nothing, words tangled in his throat. But he inclines his head.

_ So you did. _ Wilbur cocks his head to the side, humming a pitch that’s not quite earthly.  _ And I swear I remember you doing it, which brings me back to my original question. Who was that? _

“Who was what?” Philza says helplessly. 

_ The person who saved me, _ Wilbur says. And then, when Philza furrows his brows in confusion,  _ I swear I felt someone—I thought you’d stabbed me, but it was someone else, or something. I don’t know. I swear it laughed at me. _

Philza frowns. “There was another person?” The only one like him here is Bad, and Bad barely knows his wings exist. He might have been more versed in the planes than Philza, once upon a time—he’s been using his wings like a needle and thread from the start, stitching up the hole torn through their reality just based off sheer instinct rather than conscious knowledge, and every now and then those dark webbed points will pass faintly along Philza’s periphery—but he certainly hadn’t intervened. 

Then again, a half-degree of separation in existence isn’t much for a celestial influence to cross, when it comes down to it. 

_ There was another sword, at least, _ Wilbur says. He touches his chest, unmarred and unbloodied. Philza’s feathers flinch just looking at it. _ It wasn’t yours, yours came after but didn’t do anything. This one just went away, after, uh, un-stabbing me. And laughing at me. _

“Un-stabbing you,” Philza echoes. That’s not what he remembers. He knows he split one to three and stabbed them all, knows he killed Wilbur just as certainly as he knows that Wilbur stands mostly-alive in front of him now. 

(In other words: he doesn’t know  _ shit.) _

_ It wasn’t you, _ Wilbur repeats. And then, with a half-amused huff,  _ Pretty sure your sword pulled a ninety-degree turn to avoid me, at the last second. _

“No way,” Philza bursts out, because the feeling of his blade gliding through flesh and soul will never leave him. He can’t deny that it was hectic, and confused, and muddled by his own divinity howling up a storm, but he thinks he would’ve noticed if he’d  _ missed. _

Wilbur makes a vague gesture to the bond slowly settling into peace between them, like he can’t quite make out where it is but knows it’s there.  _ Yes way, _ he says.  _ I can’t know your powers better than you do, Phil, _ and it’s a lighthearted statement, but then he crouches over to the sword seething on the ground and Philza’s heart leaps into his chest.

He catches Wilbur’s wrist, stopping his hand a hair’s breadth away from the hilt. “Don’t touch it,” Philza says, trying to calm the rabbit-quick beating in his chest. “It can’t hurt you, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be—nice.”

Not while it feels like it’s been violated, its purpose abused, still inflamed and hurt and recovering and matching the oath it was forged from as it bellows disdain.

_ It’s a sword, _ Wilbur says, proving that he definitely does not know Philza’s powers better than he does.  _ It was your cane before, wasn’t it? I’ve held that before, Phil. We all have. _

“When it wasn’t angry,” Philza says. He knows it wouldn’t hurt his sons, not when that scarlet sun was the very same one that burned their nightmares and shadows away. But now, in clarity, an angry shriek cuts through his mind: steel and flame, a princess scorned, crimson and hateful. “It’s… a bit temperamental right now. Trust me on this one, mate, better to give it a while to cool off.”

Wilbur squints at him.  _ Phil. Philza. _

“Yes?”

_ You know that saying it like that— _

“—just makes you more curious, yes.” Philza rolls his eyes good-naturedly, letting the lightness of the conversation rinse off some of his echoing pain. “If you  _ have _ to give it a shot, I mean, I can’t stop you. Won’t.”

This, evidently, is all the permission Wilbur needs.

The moment his fingers brush over the sword, he falls still. Distantly, Philza hears the hiss of flame, a begrudging dismissal. He occupies himself with taking stock of their surroundings, dimly concerned with the fact that the they are simultaneously still in the park and in the heart of a star, and that the planes are still torn and bleeding around them.

He doesn’t quite want to leave.

If he leaves, he doesn’t think his wings will be able to carry him back here. Assuming his wings will carry him at all.

_ (—didn’t have a choice, for fuck’s sake let it  _ go _ since when were swords this much of a chatterbox—) _

Wilibur, still motionless, is starting to worry Philza. He prompts, “Wilbur?”

Wilbur immediately jerks back into motion at the sound of his voice.  _ Uh, _ he says, and then gives himself a shake. The sword is left on the ground, and he straightens with a grimace.  _ That was… interesting. Give it some time to cool off, you said? _

“Mm-hm.” Philza purses his lips, trying to stop them from twitching into a smile.

_ Yeah, that’s probably for the best. _ Wilbur shakes out his hand exaggeratedly.  _ Ouch. How’re you going to fight without it? _

“I can fight without it,” Philza says, which is not quite a full answer. He doesn’t say that most of what he does is rightfully rebelling against him at the moment, in anger for raising his power against his son. It’s not a big difference, really. Just the tiny change between being able to use fire and being immune to it.

Wilbur doesn’t seem to notice. He’s looking back at his body now, hesitantly examining the slumped form as though it would reveal some hidden part of himself that he couldn’t see before.  _ So, do I just…?  _

“Try it,” Philza says. It shouldn’t work, not if his sword truly did rip him in three, but—

Wilbur touches the body and barely has time to yelp before blinking out, and as he coughs and wheezes on the ground the world suddenly jumpstarts to life, like something had just clicked into place and it realized it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The air grows heavy and the plane tilts and Philza stumbles, trying to catch himself while his wings are still pinned against his back and dragging across reality.

He is not forgiven—not by himself, not by his oath—but the stars still dance for him, reeling and whirling across his vision until they’re just streaks of light blazing through the void.

And then they peel back, and the park returns.

* * *

Tubbo can’t see anything past the screaming.

He’s aware of movement and shouting and what’s probably fighting, but the issue is that every time he tries to come up and, well, take in anything, he’s bombarded with  _ together _ and  _ brace _ and  _ strike _ and  _ burns _ and  _ here _ and  _ charge _ and  _ the gate is open and this world is ours now, ours, ours, ours. _

So Tubbo has his arms over his head and another arm (or limb, he supposes, he doesn’t know if they all count as the same thing or if it goes arms, limbs, legs—his hive never questioned it and he’s spent too much time glamored to have asked anyone about that extra set of limbs that are normally just moving in sync) just gently braced at Tommy’s back just so he doesn’t get lost, and that’s it. One point of contact, and  _ noise. _ He can’t process anything else right now.

It’s a veritable ocean of other voices just—pouring themselves into his mind because they don’t expect to be heard or known by any but their own, and Tubbo wants to shout at them to calm down as much as he wants to curl up into a tiny ball and hope they don’t notice the fact that he’s one of their lost brethren.

Of course, that would probably work a little better if his glamour was still in place, but beggars can’t be choosers and there’s too much power being raised here for that particular illusion to stay intact.

Tubbo’s still trying to decide whether or not he wants to draw attention to himself when he loses contact with Tommy, and he probably would’ve heard a yelp or shout or something if his mind wasn’t already full of  _ go take kill ours ours OURS. _

It’s not that the hives have quieted now that Tommy is out of reach, but rather that Tubbo is willing to endure a certain amount more when Tommy’s voice cuts through the cacophonous chanting with a panicked, “Tubbo,  _ Tubbo,  _ c’mon, where are you—help! Help me! Tubbo?” 

So. 

Tubbo opens his eyes.

Light and shadow flash in rapid succession, an insect wing buzzing just inches from his head, and on instinct more than anything else, he shoves it away and snaps sharp mandibles at the being until it gives him space. 

He’s lucky it’s too busy chasing down a flighty Dream to pay further attention to him, but that won’t last, so he quickly searches around for Tommy. There’s just so  _ much _ happening and every time he lunges for a flash of red-white it ends up being an illusion or a false alarm, and when he opens his mouth his voice is caught by the wave of the hivemind rushing through him and carried away.

Tubbo shudders, collecting himself against the voices that aren’t his own. The cacophony rises, and the longer he listens the smaller he feels, like his courage is a cliff dissolving into the sea.

The longer he waits, the worse it’ll get. He doesn’t have much time, he needs to lift his head and speak up  _ now _ with what he has or he might never will, and it’s terrifying to consider but the thought of losing Tommy scares him more, so he slams his mental gates open wide, lets the minds of the hive pass into and through him, and—

Trying to shout over them won’t do anything. At best, they won’t hear him; at worst, they’ll sense the dissent and silence it.

Which is to say they’ll isolate him from the masses and murder him, but Tubbo decides not to linger on that particular thought. 

He has to be smart about this, not to mention efficient. He looks around, antennae slowly twitching back up as he lets the words of the hive wash over him without letting them sink in, trying to take in the world from their perspective.

It’s blinding bright here, in comparison to what they’re used to, and though it was the call of a once-holy soul that bid them come, that voice has quieted now, and the hives are not so much being driven down a path as they are simply following through on the road they were initially pointed towards. 

So Tubbo needs to turn them around without being too obvious about it. What would make them back off? Danger? No, they’d just rally against it.

Shadows catch his eye, fluctuating wildly in his periphery. Tubbo cocks his head to it for a moment, letting its inspiration crystalize into an actual idea. Darkness shudders against the sun, and an idea crashes down like a bolt of lightning, sending Tubbo surging to his feet.

The key is to start small, he knows. Subtle, not sudden, like slipping a page into a book. A little bit at a time, at first.

So it starts with  _ unstable, _ an uncertain term breathed and logged without much notice, and then Tubbo escalates:  _ odd, _ wait for the term to digest and assimilate into the thrashing masses, lightning crackling a few paces over and a blade singing free opposite to it, but Tubbo is concentrating and needs to see this done so he pushes out  _ unexpected _ next, with just a touch of fearful undercurrent. Let that dissolve into the mental soup of thoughts, tweaking the taste of it, from  _ our jaws bite our stings poison we cannot be stopped _ to  _ where are we going why are we here _ and then he proposes  _ lies, _ and then  _ trap, _ and then—

Behind them, the shadows shudder, and Tubbo hammers down the final nail on the coffin with the thought  _ cut off closed off the gate is closing we were lied to quick go back quick quick quick we were tricked _ and it helps that the shadows keep bucking wildly in the sunlight like something’s constantly trying to yank them shut, because even though Tubbo can’t tell if anything is happening, that means neither can the army of insects sloughing through the darkness.

_ Go, _ Tubbo insists, and feels the sentiment resonate across the hivement, and gets pulled out of his mind by another flash of lightning nearly at his back.

He turns, clicking on instinct, and sees Tommy alight with electricity. His eyes narrow briefly, and then widen. “Tubbo,” he says, and though Tubbo doesn’t know how Tommy recognizes him in the swarm like this, he lets himself be pulled close, distancing himself from the buzzing howling hive that have all suddenly made a dive for the ground.

Tubbo stumbles, a part of him aching to follow, but he shakes off the film of its influence quickly. “Tommy,” he says with relief. “Are you okay? Can you—”

“Shh!” Tommy hisses. “Do you hear that?”

Tubbo can’t hear very much past the buzzing and the countless voices in his head, honestly, but he shuts his eyes and tries anyway—the world isn’t rocking under their feet anymore, and when he tugs his glamor up it doesn’t shred apart the moment he wills it into existence, but there’s still just so much  _ noise. _ “There is a lot of sound to hear,” he says. “You may need to be more specific.”

“Wilbur,” Tommy says, and this makes Tubbo straighten.

“I thought,” Tubbo begins, confused. Stops. And yeah, now that he knows what to focus on, there  _ is _ a voice pouring through the air, a melody and words he can’t identify while the hives are still screaming. “Wasn’t he… not? This is bad, isn’t it?”

“Phil was with him,” Tommy says, an agreement.

“I’m here,” says a much closer voice, and Tubbo and Tomy whirl around to the sigh of dark wings trembling over low-sitting clouds, a shallow wingbeat with feathers floating freely through the air, and Philza haunted and tired as he pulls them in by the shoulders. “It’s Wil, don’t worry, he—we—the possessor’s gone. It’s really him.”

Tubbo thinks it couldn’t possibly be that simple or easy at the same time that Tommy enthusiastically shouts in delight, and notices almost immediately that something is… odd, about Philza’s wings. They’re still that cracked-glass texture but there’s something else about them now, something he can’t quite put his finger on.

Philza himself is paler than usual, empty-handed and exhausted-looking, the same way Tubbo imagines Atlas might’ve looked in current day. He sounds himself, at least, as he says, “Was that you, Tubbo? Did you tell them to go back?”

“Y-yeah.” Tubbo glances away, to where Wilbur’s leaning on a bloodied Techno and oversized abyssal insects pacing around instead of charging at them.

“Well done,” Philza praises, feathers fanning wide to drape lovingly over Tubbo’s head, like a pat, and then they curl in. Tubbo can’t help but reach out and let the soft vanes run over his fingers. They slow at his touch, warmer than he remembers them being.

And then, holding the tip of a dark wing, he realizes—he can see the ends of Philza’s wings. They come to a tapered tip with larger galaxies like splotches of light against the void of his primaries and secondaries, and they’re beautiful and vast and deep and should  _ not _ be small enough that Tubbo thinks he could hold the whole wing in his arms if he wanted to.

“Philza,” he begins, but the wing pulls away and flattens into a mass of similar wings against Philza’s back, and the man shakes his head ever so slightly.

“Wil and Bad are fixing things,” Philza says, and gestures over to Bad, whose wings are thinly webbed and boney but as large as they were to start, spanning the horizon as they dip and weave like so many knitting needles, their endpoints fading somewhere out of sight. Wilbur is singing still, and his voice is slowly pulling into focus as the sound of the hives subside. Most of them are gone now, wriggling into the earth or maybe through it, off to some other place beyond the dimensions Tubbo knows.

“What happened?” Tommy asks, tugging at Tubbo’s elbow. He squints suspiciously at a cat that trots over to them, tail swishing amusedly before the form twists and reforms into Dream, human and stretching.

“I… killed the possessor,” Philza says slowly. And doesn’t elaborate, which isn’t a great sign. Instead, he says to Bad, “The rift—is it closed?”

“I’m holding it shut,” Bad says, somewhat uncertainly and thus not filling Tubbo with supreme confidence. Bad looks around at the park as though he can see more than grass and greenery and gore spilt here and there, but that’s all Tubbo can pick up on. (Even abyssal things brought up in the light of day haven’t the sight for threads of the fabric of reality caught and held fast by the crooked points at every joint in those featherless, crooked wings.) “I think. But if I let go it’ll probably just spring open again.” 

Philza purses his lips at this, and shoots a furtive look over to the sword laying inert on the ground. It’s closer to where Techno and Wilbur are, and though the prior is occupied with keeping his brother upright, he still notices the eyes on him quickly enough to bend over and reach for what Tubbo remembers as scarlet sun caught in divine steel.

Wlbur’s song jerks to an abrupt halt as he wrenches himself out of the rhythm and tune to stammer, “W-wait, Techno, don’t—”

He cuts off as Techno stands, one arm tugging Wilbur to lean his weight on him again, apologizing for letting go. In his other hand is the shimmering silver blade that Philza used. 

Tubbo doesn’t quite get why Wilbur is outright gaping at it, especially since Philza looks more resigned than shocked.

“Techno,” Wilbur says, confused and thrilled, “how are you making it let you hold it?”

“How what?” Technoblade says, but Philza shakes his head before Wilbur can reply.

“Bad, if we used that, would it work?” he asks, and Bad studies the silvery steel like he’s not sure what he’s looking at.

“Maybe?” he offers.

“Good enough,” Philza says, and strides past so quickly Tubbo doesn’t even get a chance to tug him back by the sleeve. All he gets is a flare of fabric, an odd spark like the beginnings of a flame, and then—his sight blurs, Wilbur’s song returning with volume, the sword a smear of light and fire as Tommy leans in in his periphery to whisper-shout an unheard question, Philza putting a hand over Techno’s instead of taking the sword in his own hand and turning the tip down to point at the shadows beneath them.

Tubbo hears a breath, the distant sound of shattering, and a choked gasp.

And then a rush like the expelling force of a bellow, a sun twisting into itself in a trilling wail, solar flares ripping through them but never hot enough to burn, only bright enough to force their eyes away, Tubbo gripping at Tommy’s arm with the determination not to let go.

After a moment, the light ebbs. Well, the bright blinding flare of a light ebbs; the sun is still brilliant against a clear sky, and the only shadows it casts are the ones docile at their feet. Every dark wing in the vicinity furls in tighter and tighter until almost all of them fade from sight.

Almost. A few dark feathers drag at Philza’s heels, either reluctant or incapable of folding all the way out of sight.

Something is evaporating out of Techno’s hand. There is no sword. Techno stares at his empty palm and mouths,  _ what the fuck. _

Wilbur’s song peters off again, this time on purpose. Tubbo starts forward an instant before Tommy does, but the other speaks faster, loudly demanding, “Whoa, what was that? Wait—Wil, Wilbur!”

“Yes?” Wilbur says, and then makes a face and winces, like it hurt his throat.

“You’re the  _ actual _ Wilbur, right, not the fake?”

Wilbur smooths out his shirt with something like nervousness. “A hundred percent real,” he confirms. “Tommy—”

“How do we know?” Tommy demands. “How did it happen? It was like you weren’t hearing us or something, it sucked.”

“Philza stabbed me,” Wilbur says casually, and Tommy’s jaw shuts with a click. “It’s kind of a blur, honestly, I’m not sure.”

“I thought I did,” Philza admits, voice wavering like the very memory of it pains him. “I know it happened, I split him off of you, but you somehow—no idea how you came out of that unscathed.”

“S’my natural charm,” Wilbur says.

“Wait,” Dream says. “Would it have killed him?”

Philza nods, and Wilbur yelps in protest as Techno’s grip tightens on his arm. Tommy trembles against Tubbo’s shoulder, for once not running his mouth into the ground. 

Dream swings his gaze over to Bad, who watches them quietly, and raises a brow in unspoken question. 

“Right before we left,” Bad says in response. “Just to help me out, you know.”

“Tricked,” Dream says decisively.

“What?” Wilbur says.

“You got Tricked,” Dream says with some level of delight, which means nothing to Tubbo. Or to Philza and Wilbur, by the looks of it. He waves off their concerned stares, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Don’t worry about it, a friend just gave Bad’s power a bit of an extra twist when I went to… get him.”

It’s a very tasteful way to phrase  _ running off to beg for help, _ but Tubbo figures ribbing Dream when his eyes are still blood-bright like Techno’s sometimes get might not be the best idea.

Philza narrows his eyes. His gaze twitches from a bewildered Wilbur to a Bad who straightens his spine and lifts his chin despite Philza’s slow bristle, the hidden shape of his wings shifting at his back.

“You said to keep your sons safe,” Bad says to some wordless twist in Philza’s expression, “and he’s one of them.”

Wilbur opens his mouth, and then closes it. And then, after a beat, “I  _ was _ kind of specific, come to think of it.”

“Phil,” Techno hisses.

“I’ll explain,” Philza says. “Later.”

Techno says, “Soon. You will.”

Philza meets his gaze. The feathers at his heels lift slightly, wings shifting into view for a blink of a second before fully vanishing from sight, and Tubbo immediately misses the sight of the gentle night sky soft against the day.

“I will,” Philza promises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter written in loving memory of my cat. I miss you.
> 
> we've passed the biggest chunk of Plot now so it's denouement time next time. almost done. thank you all for your support <3


	9. loving

Technoblade dreams of movement. 

_What_ moves doesn’t really matter. It just feels like quicksilver in motion, like stained glass caught in split-second flight after a stone freed it from its frame, like… a thousand shards of steel, splintered and incoherent, so divided upon itself that it has become many from one.

The mass struggles to coordinate, but there must be some common goal in mind because it pours clumsily around him, barely managing to avoid nicking open his bare skin. 

He doesn’t know what it wants, or even what it is—until he suddenly does, with clamouring voices dumping fire and sky into his mind, earth and blood and sea and rain and existence as the collective knows it to be.

An unheard name settles heavy on his tongue, insisting on his voice. He recognizes it, despite everything. It’s hard to forget the sword that sowed shut the rift of space-time, a blade of surgical precision and silent sacrifice, even when it looks nothing like the way it did before.

“I thought you were gone,” Technoblade says.

_Broken,_ — - - - murmurs. What might have once been a song is more of a hiss now, fractured and multiplied, unpracticed words stumbling out through an unfamiliar register. _Even the undying. Die. In a way. For the angel of death._

Techno thinks of dark wings and divine flame, ever gentle, ever barbed from the outside in. “You mean Philza.”

A low keen ripples out of the mess of metal. _Even the angel of death. Falls. The abyss. Brought low. But not. You._

“Me?”

_You._

The rhythm of speech is odd enough that Techno’s not entirely sure what they’re trying to say, but the insistent way all that flashing steel slowly gyrates closer and closer to him speaks volumes already. “What about me?” he asks, holding still.

_You. Rise. You live. You breathe. For the angel of death. This piece brought death. But for you. For you. What do we bring? What do you need?_

“I—I don’t know. A blood transfusion, maybe,” he jokes, but his laughter is met by contemplative silence.

_You don’t die._

He doesn’t. Techno says, “Never.”

There’s a pause. And then, with a purpose and intent that Techno cannot quite understand, it—closes in on him, bypasses skin to sink directly into his veins, and for a split second he nearly panics but the terrified thumping of his heart is drowned out by the whispers. _Blood,_ it says, _for you._

He opens his mouth and chokes on the fragments of steel lodged in his throat, forcing out a hoarse, “I—”

_Blood. For the blood god. Blood for the blood god. BLOOD for the BLOOD GOD. BLOOD FOR THE—_

The dream evaporates and Techno jerks awake, gasping for breath, — - - - twisting its frayed pieces into a cohesive chorus in his head. His hands are empty but that means nothing when the blade is within him, _is_ him, chanting fervently, _blood, blood, Blood, BLOOD,_ **_BLOOD,_ **

* * *

“It feels kinda sacrilegious,” says Tubbo pointedly, only barely stumbling over the word, “having breakfast for dinner.”

“I don’t deal with sacrilege,” Philza says wryly. He points his fork in Tubbo’s direction. “Eat.”

_E._

Tubbo obligingly sticks a forkful of waffle into his mouth, though that probably wouldn’t have stopped him from talking if Tommy hadn’t immediately picked up the thread of conversion with, “What _do_ you deal with, then? You got the wings and shit for it.”

“My deal is that I swear to something and I stick to it,” Philza says. “Or I try to.”

_E. Death for the angel of death. E. E. E._

Wilbur hums. “And that schtick was protecting us, right?”

_“No harm unto mine where their hearts find solace, sinew or soul,”_ Philza says in creepy synchronization with the voices frothing in Techno’s head. The unison is jarring, especially as the voices promptly dissolve into chaos again.

_Blood god. E. Technoblade never dies. Death for the angel of death._

Techno, trying not to let in on this new headache of his, says, “That’s a lot of power to come with, uh, keepin’ to a promise.”

“The promise used to be picked for me,” Philza says. “It’s hazy, but I think that was the catch with the above, before it collapsed. Everyone had all this power, but if they didn’t use it the way they were supposed to, they’d lose it and fall.”

_Fallza. E. E. E._

“And wind up like…?” Wilbur gestures vaguely towards himself and then in the direction of _out there somewhere._

Philza shrugs with one shoulder, not even looking as he lifts his glass of water away from where Tommy’s elbows are flying in an attempt to pilfer some strawberries off Tubbo’s plate. “That one might’ve been an extreme case,” Philza says over the sound of Tubbo yelping indignantly. “Bad might be a better example, but I don’t know enough about him to say for sure.”

“What was up with that guy anyway?” Techno asks, reminded of that constant _watch_ that lingered around him. 

_Demon. Halos. E. Death for the angel of death. Blood for the blood god._

“Nothing out of the ordinary, mate,” Philza says, amused. “Most of the people like us don’t remember enough to have a firm sense of our powers. I’m more of the exception than the rule, since I remember enough about my past to consciously pick my oath. The rest molded their power around a vaguer calling, and occasionally leak power passively. If you felt anything off, you might’ve been picking up on that.”

_Old. Don’t remember. Remember. Know. E._

Tubbo, having gotten over his loss of his food to Tommy’s endless pit of a stomach, perks up. “So he _does_ do different things. I thought the shadows got weird around him when they didn’t with you.”

“Different celestials do different things,” Philza says.

“Wha’s your different thing, then?” Tommy asks around a mouthful of strawberry.

“I… fought, quite a bit.” Philza looks like he’s rolling the term _wetworks_ over his tongue, or maybe that’s just the crooning _death for the angel of death_ in Techno’s head. “Yeah, just heavy lifting type of stuff. Bad might’ve been one of those that handled detail and planar things, which is lucky—he started closing that hole as soon as he noticed it. Sometimes those old habits come in handy after all.”

“But he didn’t know he could do that,” Techno says, to which Philza nods. “Even though he’s had his other power for a while. Some kind of death ward?”

“I don’t know him well enough to say anything for sure,” Philza says. “But if I had to take a guess, I—Wil, you’re spilling the blueberries everywhere—”

“I wouldn’t if Tommy weren’t wriggling his plate so much.”

“Fuck you, I don’t want any of your pity fruit!”

“It’s not _pity fruit,_ what are you going on about? Blueberries are blueberries, that’s it!”

“—would say Bad’s oath is a little different from mine,” Philza continues, ignoring the bickering. “Similar, but I focus on protecting a home, while Bad’s is more about the person’s life itself, as far as I can tell. And he took my request to keep you safe very thoroughly.”

_No death no hurt no loss,_ come the whispers like a playground secret, the melody shifting ever so slightly. _For mine, undo death and hurt and loss. No death no hurt no loss._

Techno thinks _NOT HELPFUL_ as loudly as possible back at them, and stabs his waffle.

_E,_ it roars back. _E. E. E._

_Can’t you guys do a scale instead. E major? Or at least a new note._

_E._

Of course they can’t.

“—bit my fault,” Wilbur is saying, “but it’s a good thing I specifically said _you_ couldn’t protect me, and not anyone else. The other thing, the Trick that Dream was talking about, made me think I actually did die, and I think that fucked you over a little bit, Phil.”

“Wait,” Techno says. “I just—I zoned out for like half a second, let’s go back to the actually dying thing. You mentioned that, before, in the park. That you got stabbed.”

_E. E. E. Death for the angel of death._

“Yup,” Wilbur says, popping the ‘p’.

“Weren’t you listening, Techno?” Tommy ribs, reaching over to pull a bottle of chocolate syrup closer to himself.

“My ears are still ringing from yesterday,” Techno informs him, which is true. He’d hunted down Wilbur’s half-forgotten cat keyboard and discovered that the note he couldn’t stop hearing was an E, but hadn’t much time to contemplate it because Wilbur had overheard the distant meowing of his cursed toy keyboard and immediately stole it back to start harassing the kids with.

(Harassment is a strong word when Tubbo, at least, seemed more intrigued and morbidly thrilled at the novelty than anything else. Tommy, on the other hand, begged for the noise to stop so much anyone else might’ve thought the meowing keyboard physically hurt him with every note.)

“It’s kind of complicated,” Wilbur says. And then, “Wait, no, it’s pretty simple. First I got stabbed, but then Bad’s power stopped me from dying, but a Trick prevented us from noticing that I hadn’t died. Then, because _I_ thought I died, I stopped bothering to make Philza’s oath go away, so Philza’s oath stopped Philza’s sword from murdering me for real this time, and then I woke up being able to control my body again, which is pretty great.”

_Wilbur. No ghost. Wilbur. E. Blood for the blood god._

“And then I fried _twenty_ of those bugs, because they all got distracted by the feathers and shit,” Tommy boasts, slinging his syrup bottle around for emphasis. Tubbo ducks as a stream of chocolate goes sailing through the air and lands _splat_ on Wilbur’s face, making their poor brother stare into the distance with all the focus of a person trying desperately not to succumb to the Cain instinct. 

“I thought your lightnin’ just bounced off of most of them,” Techno says evenly, as the voices surge into a brief roar of support and agreement. _Technoblade never dies,_ they chant.

“Your _knife_ bounced off most of them,” Tommy says. “And then I scared all of them off.”

Tubbo all but rolls his eyes, flicking blueberries onto Tommy’s face. “No, you didn’t,” he says as Tommy sputters. “I made them leave.”

“I helped,” Tommy insists.

“You did,” Tubbo allows. “You were very scary, they were definitely already softened up by the time I made them all turn around and go back home.”

“You’re such a prick,” Tommy says with pretend offense. “I was sending lightning and thunderbolts everywhere, of course they were terrified. The only bigger man than me on that field was Philza.”

Philza snorts, laughter shaking his shoulders, and something anxious and coiled in Techno’s chest finally relaxes another degree. “You were great, all of you,” he says.

_E. Technoblade never dies. E. E. E. E. Technoblade never dies. Blood for the blood god._

Tommy preens, clearly thrilled with the praise, but Tubbo tilts his head, like he’s just been reminded of something. “You saved us, still,” he says, “but it didn’t look—are you okay? Your wings…” 

“You know I usually keep them hidden,” Philza says lightly. “It’s a hassle, keeping feathers out of everything.” Except that doesn’t ring quite true, because Techno knows from Dream’s bird shifts that dropping feathers is not as easy as most would believe, and fuck, Philza’s feathers are magical—he’s seen them move separately from the wings themselves. “They usually only come out for hugs, and even then not in a way any of you lot could see.”

“But they shrunk,” Tubbo says.

“They _what,”_ says Tommy, whipping his head around to stare at Philza’s back. 

Technoblade doesn’t remember registering a difference in size in Philza’s wings, but he’s not the one who’d been secretly clued in from the start anyway, and at the end he’d been a bit too preoccupied ith making sure Wilbur didn’t fold and puke all over their shoes to get a good look at Philza before he folded all those extra limbs away to—wherever they go when they’re not visible.

_Space. Shadows of planes. Death for the angel of death. Fall hard. Break a bone. E. Betray yourself, clip your wings. But the blood god gets blood, and Technoblade never dies._

Wilbur is suspiciously quiet.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Philza soothes. “My oath wasn’t very happy with me trying to stab someone I swore to protect, that’s all. It’s barely a punishment. Someone like Bad would’ve had it much worse, I promise.”

“What about your sword?” Techno says, and the voices howl, _blood for the blood god!_

Philza hesitates, hand hovering over plate he was about to nudge away from himself. “I don’t know, Technoblade,” he says. Even in the flat artificial lighting of the overhead lamp, his eyes glint. “It didn’t want me after what I almost made it do, but it wanted to be useful, so we used it to give Bad the boost he needed to seal up the rift. It’s not meant to be used that way, though, so it broke.” 

_Blood for the blood god! Technoblade never dies._

“And that’s it?”

“You tell me.”

_E. E. E. E. E._

Technoblade subsides, nudges the now-whispering voices away from the forefront of his mind. 

He can address them later, frankly. For now, the living room is warm, Tommy and Tubbo already dragging Philza into another series of questions about his wings. Wilbur picks at his plate, shredded waffles left syrup-soaked and sweet on the porcelain, but there’s a bit of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

He doesn’t feel like disrupting it for the faintly irritating but ultimately harmless noises flitting through his consciousness every now and then. Not now.

In time, maybe. Maybe when Tubbo finally extracts his attention from trying to put whipped cream on Tommy’s face and focuses on his questions a little more, instead of tossing out the inane ones while he and Tommy burn off their reservoirs of spare energy.

“How many?” they ask, along with “Does it hurt? Can you give it to someone else? Where does it go? How big can they get?” And Philza answers patiently. Happily.

_Technoblade never dies._

Maybe not, but he does tire. One night of good rest helped (though whether his rest could be called _good_ after his dream dripped over into reality can be debated), but it didn’t solve everything.

His eyelids droop as the conversation goes on, but thankfully he’s not the one who exhausts first. That would be the younger duo, with Tommy nearly faceplanting onto his dirtied plate a couple times before Philza makes the executive decision to round them up and herd them back into their rooms.

“No,” Tommy whines, not bothering to lift his chin from the table. “I don’t wanna.” 

Despite that, he doesn’t complain when Philza chuffs out a soft laugh and wedges his arms under the half-asleep teenager. “Come on, you lanky boy,” he says, heaving an unprotesting Tommy up into his arms. 

Techno gets up, momentarily concerned—not about Tommy potentially getting dropped or anything, he’s got a thick skull—but Philza just tilts his head in Tubbo’s direction, where Wilbur is attempting something similar. “Give him a hand,” Philza instructs, as Tommy shuffles into a more comfortable position and tucks his face against Philza’s shoulder. 

Tubbo yawns. “Probably shouldn’t,” he says, blearily pushing himself out of the chair and waving away Wilbur’s hands. “The glamour will make it harder.”

“You’re still easier to carry than Tommy,” Wilbur says, deciding to interlock their arms instead. “That child is all skin and bones and elbows, not a comfortable carry at all.”

“Fuck you,” Tommy says, muffled into Philza’s shirt. “You’re the worst brother.”

“You’re going to make me cry,” Wilbur deadpans. 

Philza hums, the corners of his eyes crinkling with barely stifled laughter before smoothing out again. “Techno,” he says, as they meander towards the stairs.

_E,_ trills the chattering voices. “Yeah?” Techno says.

“About my sword.” Philza’s steps don’t pause, socked feet silent on the carpet, but Techno’s briefly do, before continuing. Tubbo and Wilbur branch off, shuffling blearily into their own rooms as Philza continues lowly, “You never told me. About what else there is about it.”

Philza is nudging open Tommy’s door with a foot—no, a shadowy wing, stardusted with galaxies and comets and vanishing as soon as the wood starts moving—by the time Technoblade works up the courage to respond. “I think it’s with me,” he says. “What’s left of it.”

A sound leaves Philza’s lips. A name.

The voices abruptly switch notes, ringing out something that might’ve been a low G, and the tremulous beginnings of a different melody pitter-patter out. The cohesion doesn’t last, and quickly spirals back into various clamorings of _blood for the blood god_ and _Technoblade never dies,_ but. It was still a response.

“Yeah,” Techno says, “that’s the one. Is it… always this loud?”

Feathers rustle, and suddenly his sight is obstructed by a wing running over his forehead like a duster, and—

_Blood for the blood good. Blood for the blood god. Blood for the blood death of angel of death, death for the angel of death, no, no, broken betrayed no. Go away._

“Shh. Let him think.”

_No no no no no. Yes? No. Technoblade never dies. Don’t fall. Okay acceptance for them for the sons the scarlet sun shines. Blood for the blood god. Technoblade never dies. Technoblade never dies. Technoblade never dies._

—the wing withdraws, and Techno blinks, and they are outside of the room.

Philza’s arms are empty, but his hands tremble over Techno’s shoulders. “Hm,” he says. 

“Phil?”

“They’re as new to this as we are, mate. But they can learn.” Philza smiles, reassuring. “They can be taught.”

_Technoblade never dies,_ whispers the voices, softer than before, and maybe a little sulkier. A little sadder. 

“Do they hate you?” Techno asks, on impulse, because he remembers dreaming of the iron taste of betrayal in the back of his throat.

“They love you,” Philza says, a non-answer.

_Do you hate him?_ the voices ask.

Techno doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

And they, now a part of him:

_For the angel of death, once, death._ — - - - sighs, thousands in one, steel and flame and burnt blood settled warm in his core. _For the blood god, blood._

_For those he loves, the world._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand that's a wrap! thank you all for coming along with me for this wild ride of "oh god i definitely didnt plan this out enough oh fuck oh shit"
> 
> if you see the word chopsticks instead of fork. no u didnt <3 also chat’s e is specifically a violin’s open e string. absolutely awful sound. if you use open e instead of fourth finger on a i am legally obligated to ban you from the violin forever sorry i dont make the rules
> 
> some hidden lore: bad fell for skeppy. no i mean he literally. fell from grace. for skeppy. he betrayed his oath for skeppy when he met (an incarnation of) him like very shortly before the above collapsed (unrelated (probably)).
> 
> speaking of the above, no idea what the collapse was. maybe a turf war. maybe an island was destroyed by people fighting over whether grass or mycelium should reign supreme. who knows!! it is a mystery.
> 
> i know this was a very confusing ride but i tried to explain it all in the fluff of this chapter, so hopefully that helped some! i can now actually Answer things as needed so feel free to ask if you'd like sjhdfgsk
> 
> thanks again. love you!


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